It’s the season for joy and cheer and finally all winter
festivities are near. And with all things, even regular companies and websites
need to glam up and show their beauty during the holiday season. No matter what
your product may be, having a relevant website with holiday decor always helps
in business. It shows your inclusiveness in the community and celebration of
important events. And websites are the best options to get decorative on. They
have beautiful images of snowflakes and wrapped packages, bright reds, golds,
and greens peppered throughout their site, and catchy calls to action that go
along with the spirit of the season. You’ve made it a point to do the same
thing to your site this year, but perhaps you don’t know where to start or how
to get the creative juices flowing.
Getting your business festive for the holidays doesn’t have to
stop at just your storefront — there’s plenty of cheer to spread to the online
world. With in-store foot traffic continuing to dwindle (a 7.5% decline last
year from 2016), more shoppers are grabbing their hot cocoa and bundling
themselves up on the couch to do some online shopping. It’s time to also hunker
down in front of your computer to start brainstorming how to switch up your
website for the holidays.
Before you make any changes
If you dive headfirst into making edits to your website, you will
quickly realize that you may be wasting a lot of time switching images out,
playing around with colors, and adjusting your CTAs. When it comes to keeping
holiday shoppers on your site, you are going to want to plan things out as far
as design goes. Not only will having a plan save you time, but also result in a
cleaner look when you’re done with the whole project. Below are a few things to
map out:
Choose your sales.
Figure out what sales and discounts you want to promote this year.
Take inventory, run some numbers, and carefully determine what percentage or
monetary discount you want to give users. Make sure you can afford to reduce
prices on the products or services you offer and don’t forget to not go too
crazy with the sales. Sometimes it is better to discount only a few items,
while the others should be left at full price.
Recall what you did last year.
Looking back at previous holiday seasons is one of the best ways
to help you decide on what to do with your website this year. What were last
year’s CTAs? What images did you use? Did you include a holiday pop-up on your
website or perhaps a festive coupon code? Try to remember what worked and what
didn’t and base your design decisions off of this knowledge. Don’t forget to
look at what pages generated the most user traffic. Did you run an email
marketing campaign to a specific landing page? Did your Facebook Ad land users on
a popular product page? If you know you are going to be diverting a lot of
traffic to only a few pages, then it may be best to just change the look of
those specific pages.
Check out your competitors.
There’s no harm in snooping on the websites of some of your competitors this time of year. Friendly
competition is a great way to gauge how your business is doing. Take an hour or
so to thoroughly sift through your competitor’s websites and write down what
design elements you like or don’t like. Then, rank the changes you want to make
to your own site in order of easiest to hardest. Finally, determine how much
time (and perhaps revenue) each change will take. If those falling background
snowflakes are going to take a lot of programming and coding work, then it may
just be worth it to add a similar parallax hero image on your homepage.
Getting your website in the holiday spirit
Consider a color scheme. If you can quickly change your website’s
theme colors, then definitely think about choosing some associated with the
holiday season. Deep, dark greens such as pine green or forest green make for
great hyperlink text colors. Robust reds such as maroon, burgundy, barn red, or
crimson make for eye-catching button colors or backgrounds for sale banners.
Whatever important information you want to highlight on your site this season,
a red hue is your best bet to driving conversions. To tone down the red and
green colors, make sure to keep the majority of your website a pure white,
eggshell, or a muted gray shade.
Choosing festive CTAs. Holiday-inspired calls-to-action are a
great way to get your online customers in the shopping spirit. CTAs such as “12
Days of Surprises”, “‘Tis the season for sweaters”, or “Decor to keep your home
merry and bright”. Any festive play on words is fair game this time of year, so
it’s time to get your thinking cap on and bounce some ideas off of your
coworkers and employees. Don’t forget that the best place to put your holiday
CTA’s is on your homepage as well as your high-volume traffic pages.
Create banners or pop-ups. While these are still considered calls
to action, website banners, and pop-ups allow website designers to get a bit more
creative. Banners and pop-ups allow both more text and more surface area to
include links and images. Use a free online image editor such as Pixlr to
create a pop-up that will display once users arrive on your site. This pop-up
can include information about a major site-wide sale or a significant sale on an
entire product category. Add a “Shop Now” or “View Offer” button that links to
a page you want the users to go to so they can easily find what they’re looking
for. Go for metallic-colored fonts (think gold or silver) and a festive
background to indicate to your users that this is your big holiday offer.
Switch out fonts. If you usually have a modern font on the
homepage of your website, consider looking into unique, cursive fonts. Check
out a couple retail or other e-commerce sites to see whether or not they are
using a new font to ring in the holiday season. Cursive fonts are a popular
choice among e-commerce sites this time of year as they are often associated
with timelessness, nostalgia, and intimacy. There are hundreds of different
fonts to choose from — and most are free to download and add to images with the
help of an image editor tool.
Edit your business logo. Around this time of year, you may notice
that global retailers have tweaked their logos or branded products slightly to
celebrate the holidays. Powerhouse coffee company Starbucks always reveals
their holiday-themed cups in early November along with seasonal drinks. Target
and other retail stores have also been spotted with temporary logo redesigns
that are meant to connect with their shoppers on a more personal level. Luckily
creating a holiday logo is quick, easy, and affordable as long as you can find
a reputable online logo maker. Holiday logo designs can include holly leaves,
snowflakes, wrapped boxes, and ornaments — all of which would look great
alongside your company name and business slogan.
Once you’ve made these changes to your website, you should be all
set and ready for the influx of user traffic this holiday season. You can
always continually edit the site to accommodate for specific holidays, such as
Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Years. Don’t forget to also make
quick edits to your social media pages, e-mail templates, and other online
platforms you have a presence on.
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