The Home Page Still Selling Christmas

Still December on the home page

On the third of January, a good number of small business websites still open with a holiday banner.

A slider offers gift cards for Christmas. A notice gives the hours for December 24 and 26, and a box says to order by the 15th for delivery in time. Snowflakes drift across the header.

Each of those was right a month ago. Today each says the same thing to a visitor: nobody has looked at this site since before the holidays.

And a visitor who concludes that about the website will often wonder the same about the business.

What visitors conclude

People read a home page quickly and draw conclusions from small things.

A deadline that has passed reads as a business that may not be taking orders. Holiday hours with no regular hours beside them leave people unsure whether you are open today.

A Christmas gift card offer suggests that the prices and offers elsewhere on the site might be just as stale.

The visitor does not phone to check. Most simply return to the results page and pick a listing that looks current.

What to take down this week

• Holiday banners and slides on the home page and shop pages.
• Gift card and gift box promotions tied to Christmas.
• December hours and closure notices for the holidays.
• Shipping and order deadlines that have passed.
• Snowflakes, lights and other decorations added to the design.
• Dates for markets and events that are now over.

The fourth is the one that costs orders. A passed deadline does not read as old news; it reads as a business that has stopped taking orders, and people believe it.

The places outside the website

The website is rarely the only place the holidays linger.

Check the cover photo and any pinned post on the Facebook page, and the hours on your Google listing if they were changed for the holidays.

Check email signatures, and the automatic reply that said the office was closed until the new year. Check the voicemail greeting too.

And check any advertising. An ad promising a Christmas offer keeps running, and keeps costing money, until someone stops it.

Why it stays up

Seasonal content goes up under pressure. There is a date, a reason and usually someone asking for it.

Taking it down has none of those. No customer asks for the banner to go, and the person who added it is catching up on everything else in the first week back.

On some sites the banner was added by whoever built the site, and nobody in the business is sure how to remove it. So it stays until someone makes a phone call.

A worked example

A honey producer with hives on farms across a river valley sells at markets in summer and through a small online shop, and its holiday gift boxes are its busiest line of the year.

In mid-January last year, its home page still opened with a photograph of gift boxes tied with ribbon and a line saying the last day to order for Christmas delivery was December 16.

Below that sat holiday market dates from November and December, and a notice that the shop was closed from December 24 to January 3.

Online orders in January were close to none, and the owners put it down to the season. Then a regular customer emailed to ask whether they had stopped selling honey.

The banner had told her so. The fix took half an hour: a plain photograph of the jars, the regular products first, and the gift boxes moved to their own page, described as available all year.

Each seasonal item now goes up with a removal date beside it in the shared calendar.

Put a removal date on it

The habit that prevents all of this is simple: nothing seasonal goes up without a date to come down.

Write that date in a shared calendar on the day the item is added, with the name of the person who will remove it.

Some shop platforms let a discount or banner end automatically on a set date, and plugins can do the same on many sites. Where that exists, use it, and keep the calendar entry as a check.

The date should be the day after the reason ends: the last shipping day, the last market, the day the shop reopens.

Seasonal content should come out cleanly

Some of the problem is in how the site was built.

A home page with one clearly defined space for announcements is easy to keep current. When that space is empty, the page should still look finished, rather than leaving a gap that invites last month's banner back.

Decorations added by editing the theme itself, such as a snowy header image or a falling snow script, are harder to remove and often need the developer. The scripts also add weight that slows the page on phones.

Holiday hours should sit beside the regular hours, not replace them, so the page is still right on the first ordinary day.

What to put up instead

Removing the holiday content leaves a space, and the temptation is to fill it with a January sale.

That works if there is a real January offer. Otherwise the home page is better showing what the business does all year: its main products or services, a current photograph and a clear way to get in touch.

For seasonal businesses the next season is often the right subject. A line saying spring bookings are open does more in January than any leftover from December.

The counter-case

Not every seasonal item needs to come down on the first working day.

A business with a real January sale, or one that sells gift cards well into the new year, can reasonably keep that content up while it is true.

A business that only trades in December, such as a holiday light installer, may go quiet until autumn. A clear note saying when it reopens is better than an empty page.

The rule is about what is still true, not the date. Anything that has stopped being true comes down this week, and everything new goes up with a date to remove it.

Before Friday

1. Open the home page on a phone and a computer.
2. List everything that mentions the holidays.
3. Remove passed deadlines and expired offers first.
4. Restore regular hours everywhere they were changed.
5. Check the Facebook page and Google listing.
6. Stop any ads promoting holiday offers.
7. Add removal dates to the calendar for future items.

Step three is the urgent one. A snowflake only looks dated, while an expired offer left on the page invites customers to ask for a price you no longer give.

Deciding in advance when each seasonal change goes up and comes down is part of a website year planned around your busy season.

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.