When having an outbound link in the PHP footer on WordPress or similar, that appears on every page instance. Does that link appear to Google on every page? With 300 pages would that be 300 outbound links?
A friend of mine has just had a website created by a company who have their domain for web design dofollow linked at the bottom. He is trying to consider SEO for his website and I wonder if this would have any strain on a small site with only a couple of backlinks.
It's not good at all for your friends site. Generally, outbound links should be to relative and authoritative sources. It lowers the quality score of your friends site. Quality sites link to relevant meaningful sources.
At the very least it should have a rel="nofollow" tag applied to it. Sites should always link out to sites that are better, and if the site is weaker or unrelated you should use the nofollow attribute.
Official Matt Cutts answer might be helpful for you.
Footer link is similar to widget link, and Google strongly suggest to add nofollow tag on such a links, because indirectly or directly you're manipulate their pagerank algorithm.
Actually there are some websites like Wordpress.com and blogger.com add their brand name in footer links when people create a blog like example.blogspot.com or example.wordpress.com, and Google might does not consider them in pagerank calculation. Normally they did not get any penalty, because they have some quality backlinks, and also they are not using keyword rich anchor text in link, like your friends using "Website Design Company in cityname" or something like that.
Chances are it won't hurt his site, but there's no benefit for him either. That is, assuming he paid for the design work and the inclusion of the link isn't required by the designer's TOS/license (as is often the case with 'free templates'). I would err on the side of caution and remove the link.
