I think everyone understands the importance of having an interesting and well designed header for their websites, whether that header is simple and minimalist, a glossy and gradient Web 2.0 inspired design, a busy but beautiful collage, or something else entirely. Indeed, in many ways, the header rules supreme.

Unfortunately, in all the glory of the great header design, it’s lowly sister – the footer – frequently gets forgotten. Often containing copyright blurbs, a secondary menu and perhaps a few other bits of meta-information, the neglected footer has often been given just enough attention and style to let it to fit in with the rest of the design.

In recent years, though, the footer has begun something of a rise to prominence. It has started to contain more information, such as blogrolls, Flickr feeds, bookmarks, portfolio images and a wide range of other goodies. In my own experience, I often find myself looking to a site’s footer in order to find useful information about a site and/or its authors or creator.

With this new interest in website footers, it is becoming increasingly important for site designers to pay closer attention to this part of their creations, especially on sites with graphically rich headers. If a header is loud and bold, it’s almost expected that the footer will be loud and bold too. They work together, almost like bookends for the design of a site.

With that in mind, today’s post features 25 websites with beautiful and/or creative footers. Take a look at these, and be inspired by the way in which other designers are doing wonderful things with their footers.

So there you have – 25 wonderful footer designs! Does this mean that, finally, after so many years, the hereto neglected footer has finally risen to equal prominence as the header? Not a chance. The header will, in my view, always rank as more important than the footer, because it’s the first thing to be seen. But, at least we can now see that the footer is no longer little more than an afterthought.

I hope you are inspired by these creative footers! Which ones are your favorites and why? Do you have any special insights about footers that you would like to share – such as how they could be designed or what kind of content you think they could contain? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

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