I barely click footer links.

When I see that dense grid, three or four columns packed tight, I already know these pages aren't for me. There's always a column headed Alternatives. HelpDocs alternatives. Mintlify alternatives. And a dozen more just like that. Nobody opens those on purpose.

Every site does this. Mine included. We should steal what we like. Instead we copy what everyone else does.

And most of us use the footer to park pages we don't really want read. My Alternatives column was exactly that, full of pages I'd written for Google, not for people. I hid them there on purpose. They weren't for humans, and I was fine with that.

Then I scrolled to the bottom of Basecamp and saw a link list titled And there's more...

Books we've written. Where we came from. We stand with the underdogs. Kill overkill. How we communicate. Why we choose profit. Leaving the Cloud.

And for the first time I can remember, I wanted to click every one.

The list is plain, denser than my own grid. What got me was the pages. They were worth reading, and the titles sounded like a person wrote them. My footer says skip this. Basecamp's says come read this.

It made me wonder. What if I was hiding those pages because I knew they weren't worth reading? And what if the only way to stop hiding them was to make them worth reading? So I rewrote them.

They didn't start as something I was proud of. I made them the way everyone makes them. One prompt per competitor, same formula every site uses, dropped in the footer. Done. And it's not that nobody reaches the footer. People scroll there when they're lost, looking for a second chance. The wall repels them on arrival.

I was fine with the pages being bad, because they were hidden. If no one was going to read them, they didn't have to be good. The footer was an excuse to not try. The only reason bad pages survive at all is that they can be hidden. Force yourself to show one, and you'll have to fix it.

I only saw it in my own pages once Basecamp made me look. I'd been reading the pages they linked. The ones in that list, not the legal links below. You can feel the care in them. Next to them, mine were embarrassing.

So I went through them. Not all of them, I still need a couple of comparison pages for search. But I stopped generating one per competitor and kept only the few that actually matter for my product, the ones a real person might ask about. Then I rewrote those.

Take my Sharetribe pricing page. It used to open with two paragraphs that said nothing, then repeat the same point four different ways. About a third of it was filler. Now it opens with the actual answer, then says plainly where Sharetribe is the right call, and where it's the wrong one. Which happens to be for exactly the customer I'm building for.

The real change wasn't cutting words. The page finally had an opinion, because I'd actually done the work and formed one.

So I built an "And there's more…" list, same phrasing as Basecamp, and put it on every page, just above the footer. I trimmed the footer itself, deleting the "Articles" column where these links used to live. The footer got smaller. The pages got a real home. And the links got titles a person would write. "Built for the wrong customer." "The honest comparison." "Sharetribe's pricing trap." "Why nobody comes."

I thought the work was rewriting them. The real work was deciding to show them. You can't show a page you're ashamed of, so deciding to show it is what cures the shame.

My pages are not Basecamp's. They still carry some of that SEO smell, because that's where they came from. But less than before, and I'm no longer ashamed to link them.

I just stopped lying.

I used to have a corner of my site I hoped no visitor would open. Now I have a few pages I'm willing to show people.

Your footer shows you which of your own pages you don't believe in.