Are you looking for an easy way to improve your congregation’s website? Look no further than the bottom of the page – at the footer. I just randomly checked five church websites, and none had it right. Yikes! It’s time for a quick intervention.

What makes the perfect footer?

Convention has become that a web page footer is where your church’s name, address, phone number and a copyright statement will be. In other words, that’s where a lot of people who are in a hurry, not to mention search engines, will look for such critical information. Do you want to do well with Google Local? Then have your phone number with the area code in the footer.

While there are many things that need a bit of, um, sprucing up at my church’s site, this is one thing we do right. So take a look at the bottom of the home page for an example of a decent footer.

How can you create a footer that fits like Cinderella’s slipper?

  • Cover the basics. Content is king. Be sure to have the name of the congregation, the address and at least a phone number.
  • Include a copyright statement. Here’s a nifty trick for PHP coders, even rank beginners. Use the following code, and you’ll never have to update to the current year come Jan. 1 again:
    Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(”Y”); ?>
  • Visually separate the footer. It can be a change in color, a line, or a switch to a slightly smaller font size.
  • If possible, have your footer in an include file. Some day soon I plan to delve into the wonders of includes. They come in many flavors (SSI, PHP, ASP, etc.), and are exactly what they sound like – one file included automatically in another file. Almost every page on our site ends with the following:
    <?php include ‘footer.php’; ?>
    Just one tidy, simple line of code, and it’s done. Ah. A thing of beauty. And it makes the rest of the code so much more approachable too.