Populate Footer Columns for Your Author Website

Introduction

In this lesson, you’ll discover how to effectively set up and populate footer columns on your author website. We’ll walk you through designing clear, organised footer sections that enhance site navigation and guide visitors to key areas. By adding columns with custom links, headings, and calls to action, you’ll create a polished footer layout that supports your author brand and boosts reader engagement

Books Column

Inside the Books column is where we’ll add links to prominent books or series. For Dirk Volcano’s site I want to link to his two series pages. We haven’t set those up yet but I know what the links will be so I can add them now. If you’re not sure for your own site just add place holders and update them later.

• Click on the heading element inside the Books column
• Add a text link
• I’ll name this text link Dylan Danger Thrillers
• And I’ll add the relative link /series/dylan-danger/

I don’t want the links in the footer to be blue as they’ll look out of place. I also want the links to be a smaller font then the base font to denote their position on the website. So let’s style this one and set up a preset just for our footer links

• In the DESIGN TAB of the Text link Element
• Click on Typography
• Change Colour to Text
• Change the font size to 1.6rem
• Click on the CHOOSE DESIGN PRESET drop down box
• Choose CREATE PRESET FROM DESIGN
• Name the preset FOOTER LINKS
• Click SAVE

I’m going to keep the underline on the text link as a visual aid to let the visitor know this is a link. Now to add the other series link.

• Duplicate the Dylan Danger Link
• Change the text to Village Detective Mysteries 
• Add the relative link /series/village-detective/

I don’t need to apply the preset as it’s already there from copying the Dylan Danger link.

Site Info Column

This is the column that includes important links that may not have made the cut to get into the header.

• Duplicate one of the links from the Books column
• Move the copied element over to the Site Info column
• Edit the first link in the column to Home with the relative link /home/
• Duplicate the Home text link and add the following footer links to the site info column
  • Contact Dirk
  • Privacy Policy

Free Book Column

Dirk’s main on-site promotional push is to offer the first book in his Dylan Danger Series for free. Rather than place a form here I recommend adding a button that links to the sign up page. It’s an easier design to set up in the column rather than try to squeeze in a full form.

• Add a TEXT Element with your pitch for the newsletter
• Paste in the following text
  • Sign up to my Newsletter and I’ll send you a link to download Adventure Danger plus a special short-story exclusive to my subscribers.
• Change the font size of the text element to 1.6 rem

We can’t use the design Preset we added to the Footer links because they use a Text link element whereas this is a text element and design presets do not work across different elements.

• Add a Button
• Change text to
  • Get Free eBook
• Set link to the Sign up page
• Set to primary button
• Click SAVE

Summary

In this lesson we populated the footer of our author website with organised columns, each containing strategically placed links and elements. This setup enhances navigation and encourages visitors to explore essential pages like your book series, contact information, and newsletter signup, ultimately improving your site’s functionality and reader interaction.

Next Lesson

In the next lesson we will start adding content to the footer rows.