Minor Stuff As Feeding For Your Footer

What is impor­tant is in the eye of the behold­er. A lawyer would per­haps include the imprint, the image cred­its, or the data pro­tec­tion con­cept. And not to for­get: the open source com­pli­ance arti­facts. The read­er, on the oth­er hand, would see it dif­fer­ent­ly! She wants con­tent. Enter­tain­ment. Real ‘con­tent’. Not this legal gob­bledy­gook.

She only needs that in an emer­gency. In the past, we served both wish­es with one com­plex menu. Clar­i­ty was some­how in the back­ground. Today, user-friend­li­ness is cen­tral. Our read­ers are already used to look­ing for what they real­ly want at the top of the menu. And what we have to tell them by law, some­where below.

bootScore can serve these estab­lished read­ing expec­ta­tions very well:

Solution

• Cre­ate one page each for
  • your imprint,
  • your pri­va­cy pol­i­cy,
  • your image cred­its,
  • your license ful­fill­ment,
  • and — if wished — your self-licens­ing page.
• Go to the wid­get page in the Word­Press back­end and add
  • a text or HTML wid­get to the top foot­er con­tain­ing your first fre­quent­ly updat­ed ref­er­ence.
  • a text wid­get to the Footer‑1 con­tain­ing links to your imprint and pri­va­cy pol­i­cy.
  • a text wid­get to Footer‑2 offer­ing links to your image cred­its, FOSS com­pli­ance arti­facts, and licens­ing state­ment.
  • a suit­able wid­get to Footer‑3 pre­sent­ing links to your social media con­tacts.
  • a suit­able wid­get to Footer‑4 — if nec­es­sary — con­tain­ing your ref­er­ence to a minor top­ic.

Background

You prob­a­bly will ask your­self why I am going to the nit­ty-grit­ty here. Well, here the bootScore Tuto­r­i­al has thank­ful­ly thought ahead. But first things first:

bootScore brings sophis­ti­cat­ed options for the page foot­er: 6+1 ‘foot­ers’ are avail­able, which togeth­er form one large foot­er area:

• a trans­verse main area,
• below that, four small­er sec­tions, arranged side by side,
• again below a foot­er menu
• and final­ly below that the “Copy­right-Area”.

We can fill these sec­tions via Appearance/Widgets. For doing so, bootScore rec­om­mends us,

• not to use the foot­er menu for impor­tant stuff nor foot­er sec­tion 4, because both would occa­sion­al­ly be over­lapped by the cook­ie dia­log on small­er screens
• to use, instead, Foot­er sub­sec­tions 1 through 3 for pre­sent­ing legal and com­mu­nica­tive core aspects.

This way, an order nat­u­ral­ly emerges:

• What we want to promi­nent­ly dis­play is above every­thing.
• We men­tion the imprint and the data pro­tec­tion con­cept on the far left, in the direc­tion of read­ing, for mit­i­gat­ing the risk to be accused of ‘hid­ing’ them.
• We ful­fill (and set) our license oblig­a­tion next to it, in the sec­ond field, because the legal con­text is already set.
• Refer­ring to our oth­er social media chan­nels in the third field, is still with­in our read­ers’ expec­ta­tions, too.
• And the fact that the inci­den­tal is some­times over­laid in the fourth field is accept­able.

And the copy­right line? Or the foot­er menu? More about that lat­er and sep­a­rate­ly.

---

And how does this …

… sup­port our migra­tion to bootScore? Well, if a web design­er must aban­don her cur­rent Word­Press theme, she needs a replace­ment. A free ‘off-the-shelf’ theme, she prob­a­bly wants to per­son­al­ize. First a bit cos­met­i­cal­ly, then in terms of the gray val­ue of her pages, mul­ti­lin­gual­ism and inter­nal ref­er­ence tech­niques and link­ing. Final­ly, she per­haps enables spe­cial foot­ers, a sec­ondary menu or a copy­right notice before check­ing the SEO fea­tures of the select­ed theme. This is a way that this post sup­ports too.

---