Don't forget the footer?

[cp9195]

Originally Posted by Laughing Ninja

I dont think I've ever scrolled down to the bottom on a blog, and even on the rare occasion I do it on a regular site, its for a pretty specific purpose, like online job applications. I don't think I've ever done it just browsing.

Scrolling down to a footer is one of those things that if you don't do it, you can't believe other people do.

But footer links can get a lot of hits. There are people who look to them for the info that can't find.

[Graefyl]

I use a footer for pages that are not main ones. Many sites (not all) will have their sitemap, legal stuff link and other minor things. For a blog I find that the contact page is best there as most communication is handled by the comments etc.

[Betsyanne]

I look at the bottom of web pages too a lot more than on blogs. But if I don't know what kind of design it is, or want to know if it is a WordPress blog or something, I do sometimes scroll down to check at the bottom.

[Graefyl]

I do sometimes scroll down to check at the bottom

I do that too. I find, occasionally, a blog where stuff isn't working and errors appear on the page. It's always turned out to be WordPress because maybe the host server has changed the version of PHP and PHP apparently is not backwards compatible with itself (that may have changed on versions 5+). Perl based ones don't have that problem or the exploits either (mine is Perl based for that reason).

A friend is a photographer and her entries are always an image first, so when I first saw it I wondered what the software was a bit surprised it was WordPress.

[Graefyl]

Yes, footers are handy. You can have like, the minor pages (contact, sitemap, disclaimers and the like) down there. A site map page does help, as bots will find these and see the links to pages on your site all in one place.

There are a number of ways to do this, I just use a Perl script to map my whole site automatically and it seems to work well. You could just as easily do that manually if your site doesn't change often. I imagine the blog software you use may have a plug-in for that as well.

If you do use a scripted sitemap, make sure the script only lists your actual pages. Any decent script should have an ignore folder function, so other file types do not show on the map.