feat(footer): regroup links and add a Tools column

[wavekat-eason]

What

The footer had fallen behind the site — one flat list of six links, written before several sections existed. This rebuilds it as three labelled columns and brings the chrome casing in line.

WAVEKAT VOICE     TOOLS                 MORE
  Overview          Prompt Generator ↗    Blog
  Alternatives                            About
  Download
  What's New

Links

• New Tools column. The prompt generator had no footer link — it was reachable only through its marketing page. It now links straight to the live app on platform.wavekat.com: someone reaching for a tool in the footer wants the tool, not a description of it. It's a separate group because it's a distinct product from the Voice desktop app.
• Added /voice/alternatives/ to the Voice column — an SEO hub that benefits from a sitewide internal link.
• Removed /docs — synced from the private wavekat-voice repo and English-only, so it was the one entry that couldn't be localized, and the only href missing a trailing slash. Docs remain in the header.

External links get target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" and a corner arrow so the jump off-site is visible.

Grouping and layout

A flat list didn't communicate that the entries belong to three different things. The WaveKat Voice heading also frees the first link to read Overview instead of repeating "Voice", reusing the subOverview string the Voice sub-nav already uses.

Column headings use the site's existing section-label style (font-mono … uppercase tracking-widest, the same class as the homepage's "Free tool" / "Libraries"). Because the uppercasing happens in CSS, the source keeps WaveKat Voice correctly cased while the rendered headings stay uniform.

The groups are auto-width flex items hugging the right edge, not equal grid tracks. Stretched tracks pushed the one-item Tools group into the middle of a wide empty cell, leaving ~350px gaps; a fixed gap-x-12 keeps the horizontal rhythm even regardless of how many links each group holds.

Casing

The all-lowercase chrome was a style choice that worked in English but left German orthographically wrong — stimme, überblick, über uns read as errors in a language that capitalizes every noun, while the same file already capitalized its sentence-level strings (Sprache wechseln, Für Mac herunterladen) correctly.

Nav and footer labels are now capitalized per language rather than by one global rule:

Locale	Convention	Example
en	Title case	Use Cases, What's New, Talk to Us
de	Noun capitalization	Überblick, Sprachgenerator, Über uns (pronoun stays lowercase)
es / fr / it	Sentence case — title case isn't a convention there	Visión general, Cas d'usage, Casi d'uso
zh-Hans / zh-Hant / ja / ko	No case distinction	unchanged

dlOther and postBack were swept in for consistency. Language endonyms in the switcher (English, Deutsch, …) are left alone — they're proper nouns.

i18n

Everything routes through the existing localeHref() helper, so internal links resolve per locale. subOverview and subAlternatives already existed everywhere. Three new strings — footerPrompts, footerMore, footerTools — added to the UIStrings interface, the inline en / zh-Hans dicts, and all seven src/lib/ui/<slug>.ts files:

• footerTools — 工具, ツール, 도구, Tools (de), Herramientas, Outils, Strumenti
• footerPrompts — 語音產生器, 音声ジェネレーター, 음성 생성기, Sprachgenerator, Generador de voz, Générateur vocal, Generatore vocale

WaveKat Voice is a product name and stays untranslated per the naming rule. /voice/prompts/ and /voice/alternatives/ were already in translatedRoutes, so hreflang and the sitemap needed no changes.

One tradeoff worth a look

Pointing the Tools column at the live app means /voice/prompts/ — the SEO/GEO landing page — no longer gets a sitewide footer link. It's still linked from the homepage ("Learn more about the generator") and is in the sitemap, so it isn't orphaned, but it loses the internal link equity a footer link would give it. Easy to flip the Tools entry to the landing page, or to carry both, if we'd rather have the SEO than the direct jump.

Verification

Full build plus npm run check:links — 195 pages, no broken or leaking internal links, including the private /docs/voice/* (built with WAVEKAT_LOCAL_REPOS against a local checkout). The rendered header and footer were parsed out of the built HTML per locale to confirm the three columns, correctly-prefixed URLs, translated labels, and the external target/rel attributes.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_011wM5WdWCFkRyjvMEBJdZKb

[github-actions]

🔗 Preview: https://feat-footer-links.wavekat-com.pages.dev