How a seasonal website should actually work.

The mistake that costs the most

Almost every seasonal site up here has the same flaw. It is built in April, it is accurate in July, and by the following February it is quietly telling people you are gone.

Think about how a summer trip actually gets booked. A family in the Twin Cities decides in January that they want a week on a lake. They spend two evenings in February looking at resorts. They book in March. They arrive in July. The searching happens five months before the money does.

If your site in February still shows last year's Memorial Day banner, or an hours block reading "Closed", or a booking form that errors out, you are invisible during the exact weeks when the decision gets made. The resort down the lake that kept a current page gets that booking, and neither of you ever knows it happened.

What the site should say in each part of the year

Four modes, and the switch between them should take you about a minute.

January to March: planning season

This is when you are most invisible and it matters most. The page should read as open for business even though you physically are not. Next season's dates, next season's rates, and an obvious way to enquire or hold a spot. Not "See you in May." Something closer to "Booking summer now."

If you take deposits, this is when the deposit link should be easiest to find on the whole site.

April to May: the ramp

Opening date front and centre, because everyone is checking it. Anything weather dependent should say so honestly rather than promising a date you might miss. If ice out decides when you open, say that. People up here understand it, and the honesty reads better than a date you have to walk back.

June to September: the season

Now the site has exactly two jobs: current availability, and being reachable in one tap. Everything else is decoration. Your visitor is on a phone, often in a car or on a dock, and they want to know whether you have room tonight and what number to call.

This is also when you have the least time to be a webmaster, which is the whole argument for being able to change your own hours in thirty seconds.

October to December: the wind down

The dangerous one, because it is when sites get abandoned. Close out the season honestly, then immediately pivot to next year. The gap between "thanks for a great summer" and "booking next summer" should be about a week, not four months.

Five things worth building in

• Hours you control. Not a phone call to a designer. If changing your hours is hard, they will be wrong by August, and wrong hours actively lose customers who drove out to you.
• A dated seasonal message. One clearly marked block you swap four times a year. Dating it matters, because a visitor who sees "Updated March 2026" trusts everything else on the page more.
• Real photos of your actual water. Stock lake photos are transparent to anyone who lives here, and they are worse than no photo at all. A slightly imperfect real picture of your own dock outperforms a professional stock shot of somebody else's.
• A page that loads on one bar. Your customer's connection is worse than yours. Test it from the lake, not from your kitchen.
• One obvious action. Call, book, or enquire. Pick the one that actually makes you money and make it the loudest thing on every page.

When to build it

March or April, for a site you want working by opening weekend. A one page build takes about a week once I have your content, five pages takes one to two, and the content is always the slow part rather than the code.

The genuinely bad time is the fortnight before Memorial Day, which is when most people call. Everything is rushed, your photos are not ready, and you are already busy opening.

The other good window is October. You have just lived through a season and you remember precisely what your website failed to do. That is the most useful brief a designer can get, and it is fresh for about three weeks before you forget.

Do the free things first

I will argue against my own invoice here, because it is true. For a seasonal local business, the Google Business Profile matters more than the website. It is what shows in map results, it is free, and it takes an afternoon. Reviews are what make it rank, not your domain name and not how much you paid a designer.

If you have $350 and no Business Profile, claim the profile, ask your last ten happy guests for reviews, and then talk to me. That order will make you more money than the reverse.

And if anyone promises you a guaranteed Google ranking, they are either confused or selling. Nobody can guarantee that.

The short version

Your site is not a brochure that goes in a drawer in October. It is the only part of your business that can work in February, and February is when your summer gets booked. Build it so it can talk all year, even when you cannot.