Marketing·
A visitor lands on your site in December and the banner is a summer picnic.
Nothing is wrong with the photograph. But it has already said something: nobody has been here in a while.
Pictures are the proof that someone is home
A shop has a lit window and someone behind the counter. A website has neither. It has images, and they are the only thing on the page a visitor can date at a glance.
Text ages invisibly. A photo does not. Summer light in December, last year’s packaging, a coat nobody wears now. Each one answers the question before it is asked: is this business still running, and will my order ship?
The photo that never changes has the same problem
A stock photo of a smiling person at a laptop never goes out of season. It also never proves anything.
Someone who visited last year sees the same screen. What that says is not about the photograph. It is about the business: that nobody is minding it, that it looks like every other one, and that there may not be much behind it.
Your own photos are different. A real room, real hands, the actual product on the actual table. Even with no season in them, they say a person made this page.
They put the product in the right month
The product does not change. What it is for does.
The same table is where homework gets done in September and where twelve people eat in November. The same sweater is a nice sweater in August and the obvious gift in December. Photograph it in the season it is bought for, and nobody has to imagine anything.
What actually has to change
Not the whole site. Three things carry most of it: the main image at the top, whatever is featured on the home page, and the photo on your most visited product page.
Leave the rest alone. Product shots stay consistent, because people compare them; the logo and layout stay put. Changing everything makes the job too big to do at all.
A working calendar
Four season changes carry the year. Holidays sit on top.
Winter. January and February, with Valentine’s Day from late January to the fifteenth.
Spring. Late February onward. Easter moves every year: up three weeks ahead, down the next day. Mother’s Day, mid-April to the second Sunday in May.
Summer. Memorial Day opens it in late May and it holds through August. Father’s Day is the third week of June, the Fourth of July the peak.
Fall. Early September, then back to school through mid-September, Halloween through the thirty-first, and Thanksgiving through the end of November.
The holidays. From the day after Thanksgiving to the twenty-sixth of December, and Black Friday inside it.
Which ones matter depends on what you sell. Easter is a season for a florist and nothing to a plumbing supplier. Keep the four seasons, and add only the holidays your customers buy for.
Put your events on the front page
Hosting something next month, or standing at a booth? Put it at the top of the home page, first as an invitation, then as photographs from the day. An event dates a site better than any season, because it shows the business out doing something.
Shoot ahead, in the right season
You cannot photograph autumn in February. Whatever goes up in October has to be shot while the leaves are still there.
So shoot one season ahead, and keep what you do not use. After two years you have a library, and the swap is an afternoon instead of a production.
Take them down on time
A holiday image left up past the holiday does more damage than never having posted one. Put the takedown date in the calendar the day you schedule the launch. That is the half people forget.
What it is really doing
None of this is decoration. It answers the question a stranger asks in the first two seconds: is this business being looked after?
The pictures answer it, whether or not you chose what they say.