Seasonal Decorations on the Home Page

Pumpkins at the top of the page

Halloween is on Thursday, and plenty of small business home pages are already dressed for it: an orange banner across the top, cartoon bats in the corners, cobwebs drawn across the menu.

Within a month the bats will make way for falling snow, a string of lights along the header and a red banner wishing everyone happy holidays.

Some of it will still be there in February. Some of the snow will still be falling in March.

None of this is a disaster. But each piece costs something, and most of it tells a customer nothing they came to find out.

What a decoration costs

• Weight, from animated images and effect scripts loading on every page.
• Motion that never stops, pulling the eye away from the words.
• Space at the top of the page, taken from the message.
• Contrast, lost in orange on black or red on green.
• Time, since it goes up in a hurry and comes down months later.
• A plugin installed for one month and never removed.

The last is the one that lingers longest. A snowfall plugin added for December keeps loading its script, and keeps needing updates, long after anyone remembers why it was installed.

The message underneath

The top of a home page is there to tell a first-time visitor what the business does, where, and how to get in touch.

A seasonal banner placed above that pushes it down. On a phone, a full-width Halloween graphic can fill the whole first screen, so the visitor sees a pumpkin and no phone number.

Text set over a busy seasonal picture is worse. White words across a photograph of string lights are hard for anyone to read, and impossible for some.

Effects that never stop

Falling snow, drifting leaves and flapping bats are usually small scripts that animate dozens of shapes across the screen for as long as the page is open.

On a phone, that work uses processor time and battery the whole time the visitor stays, and it can make scrolling feel jerky.

It also moves across the text people are trying to read. Visitors who find motion uncomfortable can switch on a reduce motion setting on their device, and few seasonal effects respect it.

Accessibility guidelines also ask for a way to pause any movement that starts on its own and lasts more than five seconds. A snowfall effect almost never offers one.

Up in October, down in February

Seasonal decorations go up against a deadline and come down against none. Halloween is a date; the day after Halloween is just another busy morning.

So the bats stay into November, and the holiday banner into the new year. A visitor in late January who sees season's greetings across the top concludes that nobody has looked at the site since December.

That is the same conclusion an old year in the footer produces, and it spreads to everything else on the page: the prices, the hours, the promise to call back.

A worked example

A children's indoor play centre in a suburban business park decorates for every season, and its website used to follow along.

For Halloween it had an animated banner of flying bats across the top of every page. In December a snowfall plugin took over, and it ran until somebody noticed it at Easter.

On a phone, the bat banner filled the first screen. The birthday party booking button, the main reason parents visited, sat below it.

This year the banner is a single still photograph of the play area decorated for Halloween, taken by staff and sized for phones, beside one line about the costume party on Halloween afternoon.

The snowfall plugin is gone. December's version will show the winter decorations and the holiday hours, and both have removal dates in the manager's calendar.

The booking button now sits on the first screen of a phone, with the season beside it rather than on top of it.

When a seasonal touch helps

A seasonal change is worth making when the season changes something for customers: holiday hours, a Halloween event, gift cards, a winter menu, the last day to order for Christmas.

Then the decoration is carrying information, and the information is what matters. A plain line with a date does more than any number of pumpkins.

A real photograph of your own premises dressed for the season shows it well. It says the business is open, current and run by people, which a cartoon bat cannot.

Keeping it light

Use one still image, sized for the space it fills and properly compressed, rather than an animation or a slideshow.

Use the site's existing tools, such as a banner area the theme already has. Avoid installing a plugin for a decoration that lasts a month.

If motion really is part of it, keep it small, make it stop on its own, and switch it off for visitors whose devices ask for reduced motion.

And check the home page on a phone before and after. The phone number should be visible without scrolling either way.

Keeping it dated

Write the removal date down before anything goes up, in a calendar, against a name. Halloween material comes down on November 1; holiday material on the first working day of January.

Where the site can schedule a banner to appear and disappear on set dates, use that. Where it cannot, the calendar entry does the same job.

Keep the seasonal images in one folder with the dates they ran. Next October, the work is choosing what to reuse rather than starting again.

The counter-case

A small seasonal touch can make a site feel looked after. A one-line greeting or a decorated photograph, current and taken down on time, does more good than harm.

Businesses whose trade is the season, such as a pumpkin patch or a costume shop, should go further, since the season is what they sell.

And social media is a natural home for playful decorations, because posts are expected to be of the moment and scroll away on their own.

On the home page itself, the order is information first, decoration light and still, and a removal date set before it goes up.

Before Thursday

1. Ask what the season changes for customers.
2. Put that information at the top.
3. Use one still photograph, properly sized.
4. Skip effects that move on their own.
5. Install no plugin for one month's decoration.
6. Set the removal date before it goes up.
7. Check the page on a phone.

Step six is the one that keeps the bats out of November and the snow out of March. Decorations go up because of a date, and they come down only if someone writes one down.

Giving the top of the page to one message is covered in a homepage slider nobody waits for.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.