Web

A Subordinated Menu As Feeding For Your Footer

/ by Karsten Reincke | Leave a comment

being fed by grapes

A foot­er is an area for more off-beat ref­er­ences. They are more off­side inso­far as our read­ers expect to get access to what they came for — direct­ly after a page is loaded, direct­ly on top of it. At the bot­tom — where they first have to scroll — they are look­ing for minor aspects. That’s the log­ic of sub­or­di­na­tion. For the sake of read­er-friend­li­ness, the foot­er is a good place for a sec­ondary sub­or­di­nat­ed menu should:

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Solution

  • Select a few impor­tant pages from the main menu, or cre­ate a few new overview pages.
  • Cre­ate a sec­ond menu under ‘Appearance/Menu’.
  • Include these pages in it.
  • Mark the menu as a foot­er menu.

Background

The posi­tion of a foot­er menu deter­mines its task. As a sub­or­di­nate ele­ment, it will hard­ly offer impor­tant nov­el­ties. A read­er already would have to scroll ‘tremen­dous­ly’ to reach it at all.

So the task of a foot­er menu can only be to lead back to the core — in a sim­pli­fied way. It is imma­nent­ly option­al. The read­er does­n’t need it. But once she’s down here, we can make it easy for her to find her way back. Sim­pli­fied read­abil­i­ty min­i­mizes churn.

The bootScore home page demon­strates just that by using the Foot­er-Menu bootScore offers: Its main menu divides the con­tent into 5 groups. For each group, there is exact­ly one entry in the foot­er menu. And these entries lead to the cor­re­spond­ing overview page.

Slim, sim­ple, and func­tion­al.

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.

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