12 Posts of Christmas: Post Two—Customize your header for the Holidays

If I didn’t have a calendar I would know it was the holidays when my uncle swaps his regular welcome mat for his festive one that says “Ho! Ho! Ho!”. So how do you put out the welcome mat for holiday shoppers?

You can pretty easily customize a few elements on your site to get it ready for the holidays. In my last post I wrote that you may not wish to put up your “holiday decoration” early but you may need time to produce “holiday graphics” for your site.

So how do you deck the halls in your site?

• For Store Editor 2.0, replace the name-image (located in Variables) your site may normally have with one that incorporates holiday graphics.
• For Store Editor 3.0, you can do one (or both) of the following:
  • Upload an image to the header-background-image variable. Note you will need to edit your CSS to upload a taller header background image than the default height setting.
  • Upload a special holiday banner image to the Intro-text field on the Home page to have an image appear at the top of all pages of your site.
  • Upload your image to the files area and reference the image using HTML in the tagline variable. Note: You will need to make edits to your CSS if the graphic is larger than the default size (225px). You can add new rules for the #brandmark and #slogan ids to the css-edits file to adjust the default padding and width.

Example store shown with image uploaded to tagline variable.

With using either the Intro-text field or the Tagline variable the HTML you use to reference the image can also include links. You may wish to create a special holiday category (section) with sub-categories of products sorted by price or who the gifts are for (gifts for him, her, kids, etc). You can then have the entire image be a link to your holiday section.

For more examples of incorporating the holidays in your store branding, check out 37 Signals Holiday Ecommerce Ideas.

Up next—spreading the word.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business