Footer links - menu, UL or text
Instead of seeing the footer as a single entity you can consider it as different blocks of which the links would be a part. 

So you would have a region defined as footer and add blocks to that region. One block would be the menu and could have another for the static text and may be another one for the images. and arrange the same in the order you want. 

In this way the links would be managed through the menu and the rest of the things through the respective blocks.

If you are sure that the content is going to be static through out the site then it would be better to put the same in the page.tpl file.