Festive theme – Christmas

As we move closer into the festive season (Christmas) of the year. Clients may like to recognise this change in their website.

Making a website theme has many advantages, especially to an e-commerce project, a project that sells a product or a service. This is because people like to know that a website is up to date, still in use and offers are current! This is key in a company website! Customers are much more likely to take you up on an offer/sale if they think they only have a limited time to purchase before the deal is lost forever.
Whether this is true; matters not. However the thought process of viewers should not be taken lightly.

So, changing your website design to portray current events – is an effective way to reinforce confidence in your viewers.

Google has decided to take more interest in new and updated content. With services such as Google Blogs. So keeping your website dynamic in it’s content can also benefit your SEO as well as possible conversions. This makes sense; of course it does!

Graphics

The graphics are the most obvious change when it comes to making a theme. Recognising reds and golds on your website already take you half way there to a successful festive theme!

As well as colours; picking a festive ‘icon’ would be beneficial – A snow man, Santa Clause etc…
This reinforces the visitor to notice design change due to the time of year, not just a normal design change!

Of course these changes don’t have to be so “in your face”. They can be simple changes – i.e. A snowy background.

Code

This is the simple step, I will go ahead and presume your project is a website, and not an application.
By building a theming system, you should be able to take the load off manual work as much as possible. Making your website automatically change it’s design based on the time of year.

For those of you using PHP – you can take advantage of the date() function. So off the top of my head your looking at something like the following:
(keeping in mind; this will use the internal clock of the server, not the local client.)

// Get the current date (month) - format e.g.  12(dec)
$currentDate = date('n');

$christmas = ($currentDate == '12' ? true : false);

// Do something if it's December!
if($christmas) {

    echo 'Merry Christmas!';

}

Of course if you were to build a full system for this it would get more complicated than a condition statement.