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.