The Big Omaha Conference roared to a start Thursday night in downtown Omaha, Nebraska.  I tip my hat to the minds that pulled together a great new web, creative and entrepreneur conference in the Midwest and sold out it’s 300 attendee spots. Those great and creative minds are Jeff Slobotski and Dusty Davidson.

You are missing out if you’re not in Omaha. I made the voyage down from Minneapolis to check it all out. I’m a big fan of people taking ideas and working them to reality like Jeff and Dusty did.  That’s real inspiration to me.

Local web talent What Cheer and marketing mix Secret Penguin hosted an open house that got the evening started.  Things shifted around the corner at 7:30pm to Slowdown, where Gary Vaynerchuk got things up another level by doing his Wine Library TV episode LIVE to a packed house.  Gary will be presenting Friday at Big Omaha as well.

Here are a few photos and video to give you a taste of the night.

Gary Vaynerchuk doing his Wine Library show LIVE at Big Omaha

Big Omaha Conference Kick-off With Gary Vaynerchuk from Five Technology on Vimeo.

Big Omaha co-creator Jeff Slobotski at the kick-off event with me

Badges?  You better believe Big Omaha has some stinkin’ badges!

It was a great night to catch up with some great web design and marketing minds I have connected with in person and online. Drinks and dialogue with Eric Downs, Steve Gordon Jr., Jeff Slobotski,  Robert Murphy, Michael Kelley, Brad Wisler, Chris Burns, Nathan T. Wright and a slew of others.

Things get even better tomorrow with a line-up of great speakers.  I’m pretty excited to hear from Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame.

If you’re not here in Omaha, you can tune it to the chatter  http://twitter.bigomaha.com.  Holler at me tomorrow if you are here and I’ll be recapping Friday and the whole weekend next week.

Why is it that the end/bottom of the page gets so little attention?  The footer in your web design, in our opinion, is a very important web design element and often goes underutilized.

You are engaged in the page content, you read it line by line, scroll down, and then you hit a dead end …. nothing.

So many times the footer of the website is merely the spot to tuck the standard copyright line of text and maybe a disclaimer. Let’s put an end to that, OK?

Web Design Footers For Great Usability
This recent post from Web Designer Wall looks at sitemaps being used in footers. A fabulous idea for usability.  Give your users access to whatever they want next, don’t force them to scroll back up.  Smashing Magazine also offered a post a while back that highlight some creative footer examples as well. Hey, footers can be fun too!

At Five we never ignore the website footer, but that post did get me thinking on how we can utilize the footer even more to aid a website user.

We currently make sure our web design footers contain:

• Repeat of main navigation
• Explanation of the site (main purpose, main service, main area, etc.)
• Contact info (address, phone number [LARGE], contact/email link)
• Logo (often displayed transparent or reversed out, just a subtle branding)
• Copyright, disclaimer, privacy or any other site wide link need

The web design footer ideas below contain some things we have done and some we will look to add to our future mix:

• Blog headlines or other constantly fresh content
• Icons/links to social profiles (Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube)
• Full sitemap (easy one click access to the entire site)
• Map (great way to further the address of a retail/office location)
• Integrated reviews from other sources of your business

Those are just a few and there are many more, do you have one or a care to share a great link with us?  Please do and please start giving the footer some respect, it matters.

It feels like a major accomplishment and it was.  Five Technology finally has print material! Thanks to some great collaboration with @shelleyp (Thank you Shelley!), the Five Tech brochure is alive.  It’s no easy task for a web design and online marketing crew to move our services and offering to a traditional media format.

We decided to embrace the perception of web geeks and show that we have some great personality with the cover.  We truly are creative, business savvy and geek powered.  Anything to get people to open it right?

The inside panels and back cover our web design, portfolio, content management system and Internet marketing offering.  This brochure will serve as an intro piece, leave behind and a few other uses that will surface.

We can now cross one more item off our never ending list!

It’s no secret the passion we have for the web and design. It’s a good feeling when our clients compliment our work, but we also enjoy when our web designs make the pages of the various CSS & web design gallery sites.

Our latest project release, a website redesign for Buffalo Chamber made the cut and has appeared this week on a few different gallery sites.  It’s fun and flattering to have our screenshot appear along side plenty of other great designs and creative interfaces.

• CssMania.com
• MostInspired.com
• Screenalicio.us

We’re hoping to have a few blog posts later this month on web design projects going LIVE.  We definitely have some great websites hitting the interweb to end 2008.  In the meantime, here is a sneak peak at just some of the custom web designs Five Technology is putting together in December.

If you have a website you want to revamp and redesign for 2009, give us a shout!