Who’s got the Christmas cheer, then?
ven Jakob Nielsen thinks it’s a good idea to customise a website for Christmas, because as he dryly puts it, site owners need to respect users as human beings.
In these templated times, it’s one of those special moments where the fuddy duddy stakeholders momentarily feel festive towards web designers, in the spirit of giving if you will, and let them loose on the Christmas decorations for the website.
So the web designers go off all roasy-cheeked and press their nose against the Fireworks or Photoshop GUI like a kid looking covetously through the frosted shop window at a potential windfall from Santa.
My company’s seasonal Intranet header, courtesy of me
Today, there are but 12 days to go until Christmas. With one eye on the partridge in the pear tree and the other on some major dot coms, I went in search of a bit of customisation. I was surprised by what I found.
If brands got together for a Christmas works do, the monoliths such as IBM, Microsoft, Coca Cola and General Motors would be more interested in sulking in a cobwebbed corner with a cup of tea like a teetotal Calvinist grandfather. They’d be the first to call everyone back to the office because profit opportunity was being wasted. At the time of writing, no sprinkles of the white stuff topped any of their letterheads.
Coca Cola I could have expected more of. After all, it was one of the company’s first grandly intrusive marketing tricks that made Santa red. But other consumer brands were equally stony. McDonalds, a business that has famously neglected its web presence over the years, showed no signs of the impending festivities. High Street giants HMV, Virgin and Dixons were similarly lacklustre and the ubercool of mobile phone visual identities kept Vodafone and Orange’s contributions muted.
It’s the web-based brands that lead the way. Google hasn’t shown up to the Christmas party just yet, but the world’s most famous search engine practically invented the practice of celebratory modification, so in the tradition of fashionable tardiness, some representation of the glorious and the gaudy will surely turn up soon. Yahoo! has already made its foray and Amazon has turned over its navbar to some pleasantly snowy decals.
