I've noticed that several websites — especially universities and web development sites — have recently started placing mega-menus in their footers.
Here are some examples of what I mean:
On the positive side, these menus:
- give users a place to go once they get to the bottom of the page.
- present navigation options without interfering with the main content.
- can be customized for the current page
On the negative side, these menus:
- are often duplicates of navigation found at the top of the page.
- can make the user keep scrolling to see if there's additional content below the large footer (especially on mobile-responsive pages).
The increasing prevalence of such footers implies that there must be some research supporting their use, but I haven't yet encountered any. Have you?
For sites with enough content to support their use, should mega-footers be used or not?
(If there's a threshold based on the footer's size, how big is too big?)