Seasonal changes still in style?

or are they old hat?

[jaeden]

It used to be a few years ago when major search engines or other portals would COMPLETELY change the look and feel of their website when the seasons would change. For instance, Yahoo went all pink near Valentines day. Now it seems the trend is to make a change, but more subtle than shocking. Like on New Years, when Google changed their logo to show the party animals.

Our website offers items that are seaonal, and back in 1999 when we opened the site, we decided to change the banner and the color scheme for each season, and wes still do. Is this something other sites still do, or should we focus on one color scheme that stays the same, and look for some other more subtle change, like a corner of the front page that reflects seasonal change.

An argument for changing it would be that customers may want to see that the site is changing and may be interested to see what we've done this season. An argument for finding a common ground is that some customers don't like change. What do you think?

[SlyGuy]

Hello Jaeden,

We change the appearance of our corporate website 2-3 times a year. Even though our products are not seasonal, it's nice to switch up the feel of the interface occasionally (Christmas, Canada Day, St. Patricks Day, Halloween etc..)

It doesn't have to be a drastic change, maybe just adding some seasonal colours or changing up your logo a tad.

I appreciate the effort that websites make to "freshen up" their look. AlltheWeb is a good example. It's nice to know that companies have the time to get into a holiday spirit, whatever the holiday may be.

- Chad

[jp29997]

We're a product-oriented site and we keep a special area up for Seasonal-related merchandise and we enhance it's placement on the home page when we update it/change the theme. Prominent placement and update notification always spikes the traffic.

[jaeden]

jp, you just highlight the season then, but don't change the look of the background colors and such?

See, we basically change the banner to a different background, but all the buttons are in the same place. And same with our navigation, we just use CSS to change the colors of the background and buttons there, but we never move them.

[Brett_Tabke]

Don't you think drastic changes look tacky and opportunistic?

I think the most powerful branding and marketing are subtle marketing and mystery marketing. Things that make people think.

[lorax]

>> Don't you think drastic changes look tacky and opportunistic?

Define drastic! LOL

Personally, I like it when a company pays homage to the seasons/holidays and changes their site to suit. Whether they be a cart or a services oriented site makes no difference. It says "we're human and we can relate" so I'm all for seasonal/holiday changes.

[jaeden]

Personally, I don't like having the site change. I would like it to be subtle. Not only do we sell seasonal items, but the majority (75%) of the things we sell are birthday related, and many people have multiple children and may but items many times a year. Each time they come back, the site looks different, and may take a second for them to adjust.

I'd like to set the site to look the same, but maybe designate a corner of the site to 'honor the season'. Right now whenever I go to my own site I almost want to puke because it is valentine pink. Ughh.

[graywolf]

I work for a mid sized retailer and one of things I am trying to convince our advertising department of is to have a synergy between online/offline catalogs/merchandising. For example when We have a big catalog for Valentine's Day we should send out an email similarly themed, We should also change the homepage to feature the new catalog.

One of company's that I think does this really well is the "secret" lingerie company.

[onlineleben]

Just thinking about some Valentine related content/ad on my site.
What do you think about a countdown to Valentine Day?

[graywolf]

We are trying "you only have X days left to order for valentines day using ground shipping".