The 4-column footer

We changed the footer last week and someone on a call asked why. The honest answer was more interesting than we expected, which is the only reason it's worth a post.

The old footer was a thin strip of links across the bottom of every page — privacy, terms, a copyright line, an email. It existed because every site needs one. Nobody used it. We watched the analytics for three months and the click-through to anything below the fold was rounding error. The footer's job, for most of Ship's life, was regulatory compliance. It was a place to keep the lawyers comfortable.

Then the site got denser. We added Lighthouse as a second product. Harbor Gang grew up from a wordmark into a real surface — about, the book, careers, field notes. The header could carry one product cleanly. Two products with their own docs trees, their own quickstarts, their own changelogs — the header started to wobble. We tried a few rearrangements. None of them felt right. A mega-menu would have solved it the way mega-menus always solve it, which is to say it would have made the problem invisible and the experience worse.

So we rebuilt the footer instead.

The new shape is four columns. Ship gets a column of its own — overview, quickstart, docs, cases, changelog. Lighthouse gets the same shape — overview, quickstart, docs, effectiveness, GitHub, the Buzz waitlist. Harbor Gang sits in the third column with the about page, the book, the field notes index, careers, press. The fourth column is contact and legal, which is what most companies call their entire footer — contact form, an email address, the GitHub org, privacy, terms. To the left of those four columns is a small brand block: wordmark, and a one-line "Run the loop. Keep the memory." That's it.

What this bought us is a navigation surface the header can't replicate. The header has to make a choice — for any given visitor, what's the next click we're betting they want. Right now that choice is "talk to us about Ship", because Ship is what's selling. Lighthouse lives one click deep, behind a discoverability that we know is imperfect. The footer is where that imbalance gets corrected. A reader who scrolls past the hero, reads the page, and hits the bottom is a reader who's decided to keep going — and at that moment the footer offers every door. Not just the one we picked.

The per-product columns are the part that took the longest to settle on. The argument for them is structural. When a company sells one thing, the footer can be a directory of resources around that thing. When a company sells two, the footer is the only place on the site where both products get the same weight. A header gives one CTA per visit. A footer gives the reader the whole map. If Lighthouse only shows up in the header's secondary nav and a single homepage card, it's a side project. If it shows up in the footer with the same column shape as Ship — overview, quickstart, docs, effectiveness — it reads as a peer product. Same scaffolding, same dignity.

The discipline of the rebuild was about what not to put there. The footer is a directory, not a sales page. Hero copy, taglines, social-proof logos, the "trusted by" strip — none of that belongs below the fold. The reader who reached the footer is not the reader who needs to be convinced; they need to find the next page. We cut three rounds of marketing copy that drafted its way in. A column with a tagline at the top reads cluttered. A column with five plain links reads navigable.

Docs is the case that taught us this most clearly. We used to have one Docs link in the header pointing at a combined surface. With two products it became confusing — Ship docs and Lighthouse docs have nothing in common, the readers don't overlap, the layouts don't either. We split them per-product and pulled Docs out of the header. The per-product columns in the footer are now where the cross-product Docs paths live, and the header doesn't have to pretend the two are the same thing. The footer carries the paths the header dropped.

There's a side effect we didn't plan for, which is that the footer is now the fastest way to read what a company actually does. Open any site, scroll to the bottom, and the footer tells you. A footer that's only legal links tells you it's a one-product company that hasn't grown into its own surfaces. A footer that's three rows of marketing slogans tells you nobody owned the information architecture. A footer with structured columns tells you somebody sat with the map and decided where the doors go. Clutter, structure, or neglect — a careful reader picks all three up in two seconds without reading a word. We didn't realise we were sending that signal until we changed ours.

The colour, since people have asked: same champagne the rest of the site moved to. Footer links read in the muted off-white the body type uses. Hover lifts to champagne. Quiet on the page, present when the cursor passes.