Site footer - Canada.ca design pattern

Mandatory on standard pages

The global (site-wide) footer at the bottom of each web page contains links to Government of Canada corporate content, and to Government of Canada content repositories.

Text version

The global footer navigation menu contains links that are arranged in 3 columns. The first column contains: “Contact us”; “Departments and agencies” and “Public service and military”. The second column contains “News”; “Treaties, laws and regulations”; and “Government-wide reporting”. The final column contains: “Prime Minister”; “How government works”; and “Open government”. Along the bottom of the footer links to the following are presented: “Social media”; “Mobile applications”; “About Canada.ca”; “Terms and conditions”; and “Privacy”. The Canada wordmark is presented in the bottom-right corner.

Text version

The global footer contains the following links when presented for small screen: Contact us; Departments and agencies; Public service and military; News; Treaties, laws and regulation; Government-wide reporting; Prime Minister; How government works; Open government. This section is then divided and the following is presented below the division: Social media; Mobile applications; About Canada.ca; Terms and conditions; and Privacy. Finally, at the bottom left there is a link to top of page, and the Canada wordmark is placed at the bottom right.

Objective

The purpose of footer navigation menus is to help people discover government-related content contained in the deeper parts of the site’s user navigation model. The footer menus also provide direct, centralized access to GC-wide tasks (for example, Contact us, News, Open government).

When to use the site footer

The site footer should be on all pages from the Goverment of Canada. Some elements are optional in these situations:

• Transactional scenarios: Pages where people are engaged in a transactional process such that mistakenly following other links would result in errors, loss of data or accidental termination of the session.
• Campaigns: Landing pages for external marketing or advertising campaigns. The flexibility in layout allows institutions to match elements of their external campaign with the landing page.

How to implement the site footer

If you're not on the Managed Web Service, you can implement the site footer by using the Centrally Deployed Templates Solution (CDTS).

Follow these requirements:

Footer links

Government-wide tasks and government links have been prioritized according to demand, derived from search logs and web traffic data. They appear in the following order:

• Contact us
• Departments and agencies
• Public service and military
• News
• Treaties, laws and regulations
• Government-wide reporting
• Prime Minister
• How government works
• Open government

Sub-footer links

Utility links appear after links to government-wide tasks and government links, in the following order:

• Social media
• Mobile applications
• About Canada.ca
• Terms and conditions
• Privacy

Other footer elements

The Canada wordmark is prominently featured in the global footer across all pages of Canada.ca. This serves to reinforce the brand and provide an additional cue to people that they are reading content from the Government of Canada.

On smaller screens, a “Top of page” link is presented in the footer area, along with the Canada Wordmark.