The header and the footer of your website are two of the most important parts of the website: they’ll get displayed on every page; they are the way you direct organic traffic throughout your website, and it is the place where you introduce you and your brand.
Designing and implementing your website’s header and footer is no easy task, sadly. This article will help you learn about the best practices and up your web design game – a lot of things will follow once you have the header and the footer right.
This is by breaking down the implementation of its three core components: their design, the content, and how you code it. We’ll look at how to best approach each part.
Style
Obviously, how the header and the footer look determine greatly how visitors react to your website. Most people will spend only a few seconds on your website before deciding whether to read the content or just leave and look for another website. Those crucial few seconds is all you have to make a good impression – having a stylish header is one of the biggest influencers. Here are a few tips you need to follow to ensure that happens:
- Make sure you have a uniform theme with colours that go well together: there’s nothing uglier than an out-of-place design. If your header is read and the body of your content is black, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Make sure the colour scheme and design of the header and the footer rhymes with the body of your website and is pleasing to the eye.
- Use familiar shapes and don’t get too creative with it: a lot of people want to get too creative with their headers so they can stand out. This is counterproductive, however, as in most instances, your website will not stand out in the way you intended it to. It’ll look too amateurish. In most instances, people want a professional and simplistic looking header and footer within familiar structures.
- Make sure it looks modern: Making the website look modern is extremely important as well – older and classic looking websites don’t really inspire trust and confidence. A visitor is more inclined to read and trust your website if it has a modern design as opposed to a web 2.0 design, for example.
Content
The content of the header and footer are really important. Because when the typical person visits your website for the first time, he has no clue what’s on your website and how good is the content. You need to familiarize him with the website through the header and the footer. That’s why you need to think long and hard about the pages you’ll put there and their content quality. You want the visitors to buy your products/services, usually, and you need to design the header and footer in such a way that it convinces the greatest number of people to do just that.
Technique
How you implement the header and the footer is important. You need to make sure the implementation is quick to load, responsive, and bugfree. A lot of things go into the implementation, and we’d need ten more paragraphs to explain all the intricacies of WordPress and PHP, and in any case, it is hard for someone who isn’t a professional to be able to do it right. So, if you know how to implement it, all the more power to you. But, if you don’t, we strongly suggest hiring professionals to take care of it. Using a PSD to WordPress service will allow you to turn your design and content into a functioning WordPress theme.
