Ever since Nate Whitehill and Unique Blog Designs stormed onto the scene, many blogs have started to adopt WordPress elements from some of Nate’s best work. One feature in particular that I’ve noticed is the “fat footer”, like that used on John Chow dot Com. The philosophy behind this implementation is that the footer has largely been underutilized in the blogosphere and people should think more about maximizing the real estate on their blogs.

The larger footer provides room for items that would otherwise be stuffed into the sidebar, taking up valuable space that could be used for other purposes. On most blogs, the footer contains little more than a copyright notice and perhaps a few basic navigational links or contact information. This thicker footer makes better use of this space. On this blog, for example, you’ll see that the footer contains a list of recent posts, the MyBlogLog recent visitors widget, and a series of quick links to important parts of the site.

Other users may delegate things like their blogroll, tag cloud, or — in the case of John Chow — a list of “recommended moneymakers”, all of which are affiliate links that help to monetize a footer that may not otherwise make any money. You’ve surely noticed that Adsense banners in the footer typically don’t perform very well at all, regardless of the size of your traffic.

Realistically, the “fat” footer is used for items that webmasters feel they need, but they’re not willing to implement in their sidebars. This “extra” space can be used for many social networking widgets like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, EntreCard, BlogRush, and other traffic exchange programs. That said, the click-through rate on anything featured in the footer is probably pretty low, so are they worth having there at all? I’d love to hear your opinion on this through the comment form below.