Did you know that the art (and the science) of website design eventually comes down to drawing as much quality website traffic to the site as possible? And a lot of that online traffic often flows around special holidays and events, like Christmas, Easter, Six Nation’s tournament, Paddys Weekend, Mothers' Day, All-Ireland Final Day, Valentines Day, Father's Day Halloween etc.
The more holiday traffic you attract in the run up to those weekends, the greater the chance you have to convert some of that traffic before, during and dafter that holiday period. Those holidays can be something that sidetracks a business but you can ramp up your marketing and website focus in the proceeding weeks and make it a good period for the business instead. And the more casual visitors you convert into paying customers, the better it will reflect upon your bottom line. Here are some themed holiday web design ideas, to help attract traffic, that you should discuss with your web design agency as soon as possible.
It is common knowledge that holidays and special events do something to web surfer brain chemistry. The festive occasion brings about an increased sense of “carefreeness”, that any savvy web designer can tap into to improve website conversion rates. However, you need to often push visitors – just a little bit – into opening up their wallets when they are at your site. Calls to action and reminders on the website can help you with that.
Here are three holiday period website design ideas that you should consider incorporating into your website:
1) Visual Stimuli: During holidays and special events, you should increase the use of holiday-themed images and icons on your website. Apparently, or so psychologists tell us, when our brains are exposed to sights, sounds and images that we identify with (e.g. our national flag, Ireland's Call, or a special holiday-themed mascot like the Easter bunny), we tend to trust the source displaying such imagery even more than we would during normal days. This can be done in a toned down way so that it suits your type of business and industry sector.
For instance, the use of Shamrocks, Leprechauns and other green-themed backgrounds as part of your website design will immediately put visitors, celebrating St. Paddy’s Day, at ease on your site. And that, in turn, can help them make spending decisions on your products and services. This can be put in place weeks before Paddy's day and can be done in a fashion that it doesn't distract them from your products and services – it just is a nice, low key connection with them to make your website stand out.
2) Competitions And Prizes: A savvy web site design company would also look at building added interest in your website, by challenging clients, prospective clients and casual visitors to stick around a little longer on the website. You can design a special section on your site, dedicated to quizzes and competitions about an upcoming holiday theme. For instance, during the Easter season, you could run special competition about the holiday, making visitors linger around just that much longer.
As visitors stay to respond to your competition question, you can expose them to ads and messages about your company and services. An experienced website design agency will know exactly how to do this gently and never intrusively.
3) Special Offers: Who doesn’t love promotions and specials? These marketing events can be better leveraged with special holiday-themed website design profile-raisers. The trick is to create a specially designed web pages that make it look as though the promotions are tailor-made just for the upcoming holiday. This page can then be amended for the next holiday – with some editing of text, banners and images. Or you could have one page for each holiday or festival and have it enabled each year a few weeks before the respective holiday. It would then be made invisible, but not deleted, on the website until that festival comes around again next year.
Whether it’s Mothering Sunday, Halloween or Christmas, make sure your web design agency includes special pricing, unique bundling of offers, or holiday-specific products and services on display. There should also be deadlines and time-lines associated with the offers – otherwise website visitors might not feel the urgency to spend during the holidays.
Broadening Your Holiday Themed Website Design
The above three ideas are a good start to opening up a discussion with your website designer about making holiday-themed website changes. However, depending on the type of website you operate, and your target audience, you may need to broaden (or generalise) these holiday themes.
Holiday-themed website updates are definitely great to attract holiday-spirited traffic – but they should NOT (intentionally or otherwise) be the cause for some of your client base to be alienated. For instance, what if your web designer is developing a “Christmas-themed” web page – will that not exclude those among your potential client base that do not celebrate Christmas? Well, that’s where the skills and experience of a savvy web designing agency comes in. In most cases a little Santa figure or Christmas tree in the weeks before Christmas is not going to offend anyone – everything in moderation.
If you have any website content plans that you would like to discuss with the website professionals, call us on 01-6216866 and we'll be glad to go discuss your plans with you.
