The festive season is here – its spirit is spread everywhere! Our homes are decorated, our thoughts turn to the gifts and our expectations are set for some magic. But does this mood affect your website or blog?
If you were too busy in the last few days to think about that, we have collected some helpful tools and ideas to create a festive atmosphere on your site even at the last minute. For happy owners of WordPress blogs, plugins and themes have been included in the roundup, however, fortunately the inspiration does not depend on CMS.
WordPress plugins
Some temporary seasonal decoration could be easily added to any WordPress powered site with following free plugins. Apart from visual fun they allow you to promote the most relevant content or heartily greet your visitors.
Snow Storm
This free plugin brings the enchanting illusion of falling snow to your site. The animation is quite gentle and will not disturb your readers. The plugin puts you in full control of snow intensity and size.
Holiday Message
As you can guess from the name, this plugin allows you to easily add an overlaying message to greet your readers and/or inform them of your seasonal offers. The plugin provides a bunch of settings to customise the appearance of your message and even add a countdown clock to it.
Fancy Events Plugin
If you are in a more radical festive mood you’ll probably appreciated this plugin that can add flying semi-transparent Christmas trees to your site. The number and the moving speed of them can be customised in the settings.
The Hello Bar
This plugin is a companion to the popular hellobar.com service that brings an ability to add a notification bar to your WordPress site. Not being actually dedicated to any seasonal context the hello bar approach allows you to attract the visitor’s attention to any page on your site. With some decoration it can be easily adapted for Christmas/New Year. You’ll need to set up a free Hello Bar account to use the plugin.
Landing Pages
If decoration is not enough for you especially in case you’re preparing something special to celebrate Christmas the following landing page templates can serve as an excellent wrapper for your gifts.
Christmas landing page template by Aleksandar Macanovic
This free landing page template comes in two versions (white and red). It is responsive, built with Bootstrap, and it includes free PSD files and documentation.
Christmas Landing Page by ProfMe
Beautifully designed ThemeForest item with customisable 3D slider and a bunch of social options.
Feast Landing
Responsive Christmas landing page with 4 exclusive, professionally designed collages (available through ThemeForest).
MistleToe
A Christmas Special Landing Page is another responsive landing page template from ThemeForest. It’s beautifully designed to promote your products for the Christmas holiday season.
New Year Sale Landing Page
Fully customisable landing page template to create seasonal sales of different products (available through ThemeForest).
WordPress Themes
One page is not enough? Actually you can even decorate your whole site with seasonal WordPress themes.
Xmas Theme by Site5
Xmas is a two columns simple theme decorated with Smashing Christmas Icon Set with the main goal of giving a blog a very festive, snowy, New Year’s atmosphere. The theme has widgetised areas and can be customised through options set.
Mistletoe Theme
Mistletoe is a two column minimalist Christmas-style theme with responsive layout, handwriting fonts from Google Webfonts and bundled custom widgets and shortcodes.
New Year Theme
New Year Theme is a responsive WordPress theme with an impressive set of features like customisable sidebars, dynamic content loader, sliders and shortcodes. But the most important feature of the theme is it’s unmistakable festive spirit.
Xmas Theme by SMThemes
Xmas is another free (with premium option) theme by SMThemes dedicated to the Christmas celebration. It’s also responsive and has flexible customisation options.
Infographics
Christmas and New Year themselves are excellent sources of interesting data, comparison and studies. So we have collected some festive-related infographics from all over the world to visualise the phenomena of year end.
Evolution of Christmas Gifts
Maplin Electronics studies how the most desirable Christmas gifts have changed in recent decades.
The Best Gifts to Give Your Website this Christmas
Mint Leaf Studio offers to prepare gifts not only for your friends but for your website also.
Christmas Food around the World
Great British Chefs acquaints us with Christmas cookery traditions from different parts of the world.
The Origin and Evolution of Santa Claus
DegreeSearch Blog presented the illustrated history of Santa Claus as the most important festive persona.
Santa’s Christmas Journey
Case Luggage has collected different traditions and fun facts about Christmas and the New Year celebration all over the world.
Gift Ideas
Nobody can imagine Christmas without gifts, even web designers and bloggers. Let us present some gift ideas for every site owner to enjoy.
Foldables
Foldables are funny characters that could be designed on foldable.me site then printed and delivered to you (or anybody you like) by post.
Like/Dislike Facebook Stamps
Preloaded with ink, these zeitgeist-riding rubber stamps let you whack an unequivocal thumbs up/thumbs down on objects in the real world.
A Book Apart Library
The complete set of A Book Apart books is available in both paperback and ebook variants.
Dot Grid Book
The Dot Grid Book is the ideal tool for sketching, providing an alternative to traditional lines and boxes. The light geometric dot matrix serves as a subtle guide for notes and elements.
Grid-It Organiser
The Cocoon Grid-It is a laptop sleeve that is ingeniously constructed to hold all of your small gadgets, chargers and various other items. It will be your friend in any travel whatever the distance.
Merry Christmas!
Our list has ended but the possibilities to create the Christmas spirit on your site are endless.
What has inspired you this festive season? What ideas have you come up with? Let us know in the comments.