[unclebucknasty]

What's particularly interesting about the big footer as a UI problem here is that it underscores the trickiness of balancing good UI with converting. For instance, people came to hate popup windows, and they became anathema to a good UI. However, the reason they were used is because they succeeded in getting the user's attention.

Likewise, in this article, the giant footer takes up half my tablet's page, yet the author does this because it contains his call to action.

It is completely fair to point out the irony of an article about good UI design residing on a site with questionable UI design. And while many of the points made were common sense or already known to me, I did learn and/or refresh a bit and so personally appreciated the article.

Still, it would be good to get more insight about the far trickier question: how to engage and compel users to your call to action without having to resort to offending them with popups, giant footers, etc.

[ulisesrmzroche]

Just to not do anything that offends them. If that means no popups, or giant trailing footers, then that means no popups or giant trailing footers under no circumstance whatsoever.

The call to action has to be non-intrusive. And that's probably going to depend on the type of call to action, though I think that if he had left the footer as it was intended to do (the offer comes after the article is done, once you read the whole thing and you're sold, as is the traditional approach that you know, sells) it would have worked much better.

It's hard to read through a slot, and who wants to do that?

So a marketing page needs to be easy to read and give the call to action at the end.