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Sliders in Web Design: To Use or Not to Use?

By Alan Smith

Many designers have strong opinions about the use of sliders and slider controls in website design. Some love them; others hate them. A poorly-timed carousel or automated gallery slider can distract users from more critical site aspects. On the other hand, a manual slider allows mobile and website users to navigate through a range of content features or options quickly. Explore sliders and slider controls and find out when they are most useful in web design .

What are Sliders?

A slider is a term that refers to a slideshow on a website. An example of a slider can be a revolving carousel that displays products or photos. Web designers can incorporate sliders into all kinds of sites, but they are most useful for businesses wanting to show relevant content or showcase professional portfolios. When designers want to quickly show multiple options and help users sort through them quickly, a slider helps narrow down choices.

Why the Love Hate?

If you conduct a web search for sliders, near the top of the SERP, you will find critics who hate them, and just as many designers arguing in their favour. Here are some viewpoints on each side.

Critics argue sliders are confusing since they present users with several options at once, all of which have the same weight or importance. Since UX is about making choices clear, they say anything that creates confusion should be avoided. They also offer the following reasons they are bad UX:

Some say a moving slideshow can have the same negative impact as auto-playing video. Instead of sliders, critics recommend using static images and copy.

Diagrammatically opposite, some designers love sliders and argue just as vehemently in favour of their use. Here are some ways adequately used content sliders can be good UX:

When to Use Sliders

While sliders are not right for every website, there are some they enhance. Start by analysing what your user is looking for and how each page of your website can help them toward completing that goal. If sliders solidify the brand and enhance the user’s trust, they can be a critical part of UX. If they create distraction and confusion, they will negatively impact conversions. Each organisation is unique, so what works flawlessly for some might have a detrimental effect on others.

Avoid making sliders a distraction by minimising transitions and choosing soft fades instead of jerky horizontal slides. Make navigation easy with noticeable arrow buttons for moving backwards and forward. Allow mobile users to swipe. Optimise page load time by using the smallest possible image size and wait to load slides later in the carousel, since viewers may not require them.

Use Sliders for Product Tours

When site visitors see large chunks of information, it can be overwhelming. If you offer a product that works in a series of steps, use sliders to show the series and create a visual for the user.

For example, a company that uses smartphones to process credit card transactions might feature on its site a slider that shows a customer presenting the card as payment, an employee swiping it through the device, and funds being transferred to the desired account. What would have taken the user several minutes to read through text, they quickly understand through a slider in seconds. The same process can be adapted to user onboarding for new sites and mobile apps.

Make New Content Stand Out

First-time website visitors often want to know what their options are and what the website has to offer. Homepage content sliders provide a brief overview and allow visitors to make a decision quickly.

If you regularly update your site, sliders can emphasise updates. On news websites, the latest and most sensational material is usually the focus of their content slider. Every update stands at the forefront for as long as it is the latest news or newest offering. Users know at a glance when things have changed.

Present Photo Galleries

Sometimes a single image makes a powerful statement about your brand. Other times, a collection of images provides compelling evidence of an organisation’s quality, value and trustworthiness. A slider goes beyond simply displaying images. It both organises and displays images irrespective of whether you choose a photo gallery with several small images or screen after screen of full-page high-quality graphics.

Photo galleries can be indispensable for organisations that sell real estate or cars. Home buyers want to see multiple photos of a home before they view it in person, and sliders allow them to quickly thumb through.

Car manufacturers present screen after screen of their vehicle’s elite features and innovative design to interest buyers in further details. Instead of having to select individual images, shoppers can quickly flip through. The reduced friction enhances user experience.

Display Portfolios Online

Artists, graphic designers and web developers often seek to demonstrate their products, skills and abilities. Clients want to see a taste or a brief overview that allows them to assess overall quality and tone. A slider enables designers to display work in a flexible format. Visitors can see as much or as little as they wish, but even if they do not stay long, they leave with a general impression.

Showcase Ecommerce Options

Online entrepreneurs can display a few of the company’s most popular or recognisable products to draw users in, emphasise new varieties or flavours, or show categories to make it easier for users to shop. Designers who research e-commerce web design trends for better sales know some of the most effective layouts use a minimalist approach and plenty of white space , so the slider is allowed to shine.

Test for Effectiveness

Sliders are useful if they tell a story and leave control over viewing with the user. If you are not sure if your slider improves user experience, test it. If you are just designing your page, run an A/B test to see how users interact with the slider and which version they prefer. See which version had the higher conversion rate or increased revenue.

If the slider is on an existing page, track user interaction and click-through data. Note the point at which clicks begin to diminish. Often interest wanes as users proceed through multiple slides. This can be because designers usually put the most compelling content first, but if subsequent material fails to hold user interest, it just slows page load times.

In Conclusion

Each site is different, and each receives different types of visitors. Designers who start with what the user needs and design content around their preferences and interaction style use a wide range of tools to present content. When used correctly, sliders can be implemented to create an even more immersive browsing experience.

Want to learn more?

Are you interested in the intersection between UX and UI Design? The online courses on UI Design Patterns for Successful Software and Design Thinking: The Beginner’s Guide can teach you skills you need. If you take a course, you will earn an industry-recognized course certificate to advance your career. On the other hand, if you want to brush up on the basics of UX and Usability, try the online course on User Experience (or another design topic ). Good luck on your learning journey!

(Lead image: Depositphotos – affiliate link )

About Alan Smith

Alan Smith is an is an out of the heart writer voicing out his take on various topics of social media, web design, mobile apps, digital marketing, entrepreneurship, startups and much more in the cutting edge digital world. He is associated with SPINX Digital a Los Angeles web design company & digital marketing agency. When he is not writing, he can be found traveling outdoors with his camera. You can follow Alan on Twitter @Alan Smith

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What Is a Slider in a Website? [Full Explanation + Examples]

A slider is an element used in certain websites that allows visitors to consume different chunks of information within the same space. They are also known as carousels or slideshows, and they can contain images, videos, or any other website elements. They can be consumed in a sequential or non-sequential order.

A slider is useful when developers want to present a lot of information in a reduce amount of space. Visitors can usually consume the content by choosing which chuck of information to pay attention to.

Sliders can also spin the different chunks of information in an automatic way, so visitors get pressented with different options to choose from.

The name "slider" comes from its similarity to a traditional carousel, but... what is a slider in WordPress? Does it refer to the same thing?

What is a Slider in WordPress?

A Slider in WordPress is a webpage component that presents any kind of information (images, videos, text...). Sliders show just one thing at a time and may be configured to move automatically or when prompted by user input. Sliders can be added to almost any page on a WordPress website.

You can opt for a free or paid WordPress slider plugin to implement this element on your website.

If you still have some doubts about what a slider is, the best way to get an idea is by checking examples of websites using sliders .

Why Should You Use a Slider on a Website?

Now that you know what is a slider on a website, here are some reasons why it can be a great idea to use one on your webpage:

Display more information: Sliders Pack A Lot Of Information Into A Small Amount Of Space. You can compress the material within a designated area, and consumers can examine it only when they find it useful throughout their browsing activity on the page.

Sliders capture users' attention . From the moment they land on a website's homepage, they will see the slider. They can improve visitor engagement, understanding, and retention of knowledge.

Sliders are fully controlled by users . They give users greater power by allowing them to choose whether or not to focus on one slide's information. They assist visitors in focusing on what is important and allow them to get the relevant information whenever they choose.

Sliders are great sortcuts: Sliders serve as a one-stop shop for consumers before embarking on a lengthy journey. This may lead them to one route or another of content navigation. When used properly, they can be used to get the visitor from the homepage to other pages to view more of what you offer on your website.

Sliders are beautiful. Sliders have a pleasing aesthetic appearance. They're appealing to the eye and are frequently the first thing consumers see when they visit a website. This makes them effective at keeping the visitors interested and making your site more fun to browse.

Slides are dynamic. Sliders And Carousels Are Ideal Choices For Dynamically Changing Material (you may wish to highlight new content, and this element comes in handy). A blog, for example, is regularly updated with new entries, and you may include fresh posts in a slider/carousel that appears on the blog homepage).

Sliders are great for storytelling. Sliders and carousels are very useful for product tours. They give multiple perspectives on the same product in an engaging and enjoyable manner.

2 Basic Steps to Add a Slider in WordPress

Adding a WordPress Slider requires the use of a plugin to install a slider or the use of custom CSS extensions. There are many plugins to choose from, with varying degrees of control.

Check our full tutorial about How to Add a Sliding Gallery to WordPress for more information.

1. Create The Slider With a WordPress Plugin

To add a WordPress slider with a plugin, there are a few simple steps to follow. Let’s review them:

if(typeof ez_ad_units != 'undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[336,280],'alvarotrigo_com-box-4','ezslot_6',109,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-alvarotrigo_com-box-4-0'); 2. Add custom CSS stylesheets

Because many WordPress image sliders do not allow custom styling, you must change your theme's HTML and CSS to apply custom elements to your sliders. Using a CSS addon, on the other hand, saves time and allows you to insert unique CSS for every separate slider.

Here's how to do it:

6 Best Slider Plugins for You to Consider

1. fullpage.js.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

fullPage.js is the most popular full-screen scrolling slider for WordPress that can be configured horizontally, vertically, or both.

Unlike most carousels, fullPage.js is meant to be used in full-screen and it works by sliding the whole section when scrolling with the mouse wheel or trackpad.

With 50+ options, fullPage.js is totally configurable and will for sure save you hundreds of hours of development.

If you are looking for a WordPress slider that will make your page stand out, fullPage.js is with no doubt a great option. It's maintained by a team of people, up to date, and with great personalised support.

It works with either Elementor or Gutenberg builders for WordPress.

if(typeof ez_ad_units != 'undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[580,400],'alvarotrigo_com-large-leaderboard-2','ezslot_8',110,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-alvarotrigo_com-large-leaderboard-2-0'); 2. Slider Revolution

Preview Slider

Slider Revolution is a powerful slider plugin for WordPress. It has many features that are difficult to find in other slider plugins. It also has a lot of customizability options for you to choose from.

Regarding the design, Slider Revolution has a unique feature called "swipeable" sliders. This allows you to create a smooth transition between each slide by using swipe gestures on your keyboard or touchscreen device. You can also choose from different styles and adjust the size and position of your content on the slider.

This plugin also allows you to create unlimited slideshows with just one click. In addition, you can upload images, videos, audio files, or text files into your slideshow with ease using their drag-and-drop interface.

Slider Revolution also offers many other customization options like color themes, fonts, and layouts, allowing you to personalize your blog posts instantly.

3. LayerSlider

Layerslider is a responsive slider plugin for WordPress that allows you to create beautiful, eye-catching slideshows that are simple to use.

It has been designed to help you build beautiful slideshows quickly and easily without worrying about any technical aspects of coding. You can even add several slideshows to one page, so you don't have to worry about having too many images on your page.

This plugin was created with the idea that anyone could use it, whether they're an experienced developer or a newbie who's just starting in website design.

4. MetaSlider

Meta Slider is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create beautiful slideshows easily. Let's face it: creating a slideshow can be an intimidating task. However, with the Meta slider plugin, you can easily create slideshows on your WordPress site.

The Meta Slider plugin is easy to use because it uses a drag-and-drop interface that makes creating slideshows simple. You can easily create different sizes and formats or upload images from your computer or other websites. You can also add captions and videos to your slideshow.

The Meta Slider plugin has features like auto-rotation, which allows users to rotate their images when displayed on the page, time lapse effects, and more.

5. Master Slider

The Master Slider plugin is a premium content slider plugin that can be used to create an infinite number of sliders on your WordPress site.

The main features of this plugin are:

6. Edge Slider

The Edge Slider is a jQuery plugin that lets you create incredible slideshows with just one line of code.

In addition to being easy to use, this plugin has a lot of functionality built in. For example, you can easily add transitions between slides by using the transition manager. You can also add some neat effects like fading and sliding in/out on specific slides.

Sliders: An Essential Element in Many Websites

Sliders are versatile and are likely one of the most effective ways to showcase your message or product since they will get your viewers' attention.

Everyone has different needs when it comes to getting those messages across and conveying their products.

Knowing which slider fits your business is not easy.

And while no one can give you a definitive answer on picking the best slider for your project, this guide explains what a slider is and can help you decide what features are most important to you and hopefully point you in the right direction.

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Definition: Slider

In web design terminology, the term slider is used to designate a slideshow that is integrated into a web page. It can also be called carousel .

There are many WordPress plugins that allow you to create sliders that you can add to your homepage, or in a post , or anywhere else on your site.

Sliders can be used on all kinds of websites, however they are most often used on corporate websites or to present professional portfolios

A slider can run automatically by displaying the slides at a predefined time interval. Sliders can also react to user interaction such as clicking or swiping to display the previous or next slide .

Before using a slider on a WordPress site, there are a number of things the user should consider.

First, sliders typically load images and slide content, which can slow down your site.

Another issue that can arise when using a slider in WordPress is adaptability to mobile devices. If your WordPress site uses a responsive theme, then the use of a non-responsive slider will break the display of the site on different devices with variable screen sizes.

A responsive slider plugin is able to adjust the size of the slideshow as well as the different contents (images, texts, videos) to fit any screen size.

There was a time when sliders were very popular. However, their effectiveness is now often questioned. Indeed, studies show that they are often not viewed in their entirety .

To learn more about sliders, read this article .

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What is a Slider? The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Sliders

Sliders. Carousels. Slideshows. No matter what you call them, sliders are an incredibly versatile design tool that allow you to showcase images, video, and other content beautifully and more effectively while maximizing the space on your website.

Whether you need a simple way to display a slideshow of photos on an eCommerce or real estate websites, or want a bold video header with calls-to-action, sliders can help you quickly grab your visitors’ attention .

In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into sliders, using examples from Smart Slider 3 , a popular slider plugin for WordPress. We’ll explore what they are, how they’re used , the various kinds of sliders you can create, as well as all the different types of behaviors, elements, animations and effects you can include in your sliders.

What is a Slider?

The term slider is used for a design element, which is added to a WordPress page to display visual content . From classic image slideshows to modern fullscreen sliders , sliders come in all shapes and sizes. Using the right WordPress slider plugin, it’s easy to create your own sliders.

Designers love sliders for their flexibility and the visual elements that make it easy to tell a compelling story. Site owners, on the other hand, love them because they can promote multiple facets of a business within one website component and space. At their most basic, an image slideshow might contain a series of images, each with its own caption, like this example:

But in recent years, sliders have evolved to provide greater functionality and feature beyond simple images and text . Now, you can add video, use layers to combine images, text, and buttons, and even include a mix of elements and animations — all within the same slider.

Let’s take a look at a few modern examples .

Amazon uses sliders liberally throughout its site to promote its products. On the homepage, there’s a slider with featured products, as well as several small sliders below with best sellers.

In this example, Airbnb uses a slider on its homepage to display cities were people can book short stay accommodation around the world:

And in this more complex example, Lonely Planet uses a fullscreen homepage slider incorporating navigation and text previews to showcase its latest featured articles:

These are just some of the big brands using sliders to showcase their best content while maximizing all-important screen space.

But it’s not just big brands using sliders. Sliders are easy to add to any WordPress site, and there are plenty of options out there, particularly for WordPress users.

How Do Sliders Work with WordPress?

Adding sliders to your WordPress site is as easy as installing and activating a plugin, and then using the provided visual builder to design your slider.

There are many WordPress slider plugins available, which allow you to create sliders and add them to any page or post on your site. You can download free slider plugins from WordPress.org . Below, you’ll see Smart Slider 3 is the highest rated slider plugin for WordPress :

Sliders in WordPress.org's plugin directory

There are also many premium slider plugins available for WordPress, such as Smart Slider 3 Pro and Revolution Slider , the latter of which is packaged with many ThemeForest themes.

Typically, free slider plugins offer only basic features, such as the ability to create image sliders with captions and simple transitions. When you upgrade to a premium slider plugin, you can start building more complex sliders using layers, images, text, videos, CTAs, animations , and more.

Types of Sliders

Available slider types in Smart Slider 3: Simple, Block, Carousel and Showcase

Types of Slider Layouts

Working with Slider Layers

Free slider plugins (with the exception of Smart Slider 3) allow you to create only basic slideshows using images and text. Premium slider plugins, on the other hand, let you design to your heart’s content with layers.

Layers are basically content building block that you can add to sliders to create more functional, beautiful, and complex designs. Similarly, Photoshop and other image editing programs use layers to enable users to stack and work with different types of content.

The most basic layers you’ll find in premium slider plugins include: Headings, Text, Images, Buttons and Videos (YouTube, Vimeo, and self-hosted).

Some premium and advanced sliders may also offer other types of content layers, such as: Icons, Lists, Captions, Image boxes (and image areas), Transitions, Progress bars, Counters (and circle counters), Audio, Text areas and iFrame.

The best way to fully understand how layers work is to see them in action. Check out the video below to see how layers work in the free version of Slider Slider 3 .

Adding Animations and Effects to Sliders

You’re probably familiar with the default right to left slide background animation that many images slideshows use when transitioning through images. But what’s exciting about working with sliders is that there are many more awesome animations and effects you can use to add both bold and subtle effects to your website.

Background Animations

Whether you want to fade, rotate, zoom, or have your images metaphorically explode, there are dozens of different background animations you can use for transitions between each slide.

Layer Animations

Text Animations

With text animations you can animate your words and bring text to life as a chain of lines, words, or characters.

Ken Burns Effect

Make your slides pop with this elegant zooming and panning Ken Burns effect , invented for film. A simple way to give your images the illusion of motion.

Animated shape divider

Add moving curves, clouds, and diagonal shapes to your sliders with an animated shape divider effect.

Particle effect

Stunning yet deceptively simple. Using the particle effect allows you to add moving shapes and lines, dots, triangles, and polygons that follow the cursor

Creating Sliders: Features and Functionality to Look Out for When Choosing a WordPress Slider Plugin

Now that you’ve got a basic understanding of the different types and behaviors of sliders, as well as layers, animations, and effects, it’s time to look at some of the advanced features you can expect to see in reputable WordPress slider plugins .

From different types of content and dynamic elements to performance and optimization capabilities, these are the features you should look out for when choosing a quality slider plugin.

Visual Editor

Every good slider plugin should come with a visual editor that allows you to design each individual slide, much like how you would with Photoshop and other image editing programs.

Visual editor allows you to drag-and-drop layers, change fonts, sizes, colors, add animations and effects , and generally manipulate the content in your slides to look exactly how you want.

Layers and Customization

Imagine if Photoshop didn’t have layers? It would be difficult to design and edit images, right? Surprisingly, many slider plugins don’t use layers. Without them, you’re severely limited in how you can design your plugins.

Layers allow you to create content-rich sliders, which might have various images, text, video, and other elements layered together to form one interactive slide.

When choosing a slider plugin, make sure it includes the most basic layers (headings, text, images, video, and buttons) , as well as any advanced content you might need, such as icons, audio, lists, and counters.

Live Preview

Like any software, live preview allows you to quickly see every change you make in real-time. For example, after updating an image or adding a text layer or transition, you can click ‘Preview’ to quickly preview your changes and see what your slider looks like with all over your layers, animations and effects working together .

Dynamic Content

You aren’t limited to adding just static images, video, and text to your slides. Some slider plugins, like Smart Slider 3, allow you to populate slides with dynamic content , such as WordPress and Joomla blog posts, YouTube playlists, and even products from your WooCommerce site.

This means you can dynamically display content, such as your eCommerce store’s best-selling products, your latest blog posts, or even new video additions to your YouTube channel.

Page Builder Compatible

If you’ve built your site using a page builder, such as Elementor , Beaver Builder, Divi, Site Origin or WP Bakery Page Builder, be sure to check that any slider plugin you choose is compatible.

Responsive Design

Ensuring that your site design is responsive is crucial now that Google has moved to mobile-first indexing . So choose a slider plugin that provides responsive design out-of-the-box.

Some sliders, like Smart Slider 3, provide device-specific settings for desktop, tablet and mobile . This means your sliders will automatically adjust for different devices. You can choose to enable features like tilt and swipe, or simply turn off sliders for particular devices.

Support and Updates

Premium slider plugins should always come with priority support, so if you run into any issues you can get in touch for help. Support generally doesn’t come with free slider plugins, though you can use the WordPress Support Forums if you have any questions.

Keeping your slider plugin up-to-date is also important for security and performance , and so you can upgrade to receive new features.

Speed and Performance

There’s a common perception that sliders negatively impact website performance. Often, people add images to sliders that are too big or haven’t been optimized. So if a slider plugin further impacts performance, it’s a double whammy for page load speed.

It’s important that your slides load immediately but don’t slow down the loading of your pages, so look out for slider plugins that offer image optimization such as generating smaller images for tablet and mobile visitors and converting the images to WebP for faster load time. The ability to lazy load some of the images is another great feature to have. Both of these techniques will help your slides load quickly.

SEO-Friendly

When you’re adding different types of content such as images and video to your sliders, it makes sense to leverage it for SEO , right? So when choosing a slider plugin, make sure it’s been designed with SEO in mind and its HTML structure follow SEO best practice . This will ensure your individual slides—along with the alt text you have entered for your content—ranks in search.

Developer-Friendly

If you want even more control over the design of your slides, look for a slider plugin that’s developer-friendly and allows for custom code within slides, but also allows you to edit external files for customizations like animations and effects.

Now that you learned all there is to know about sliders and how they work with WordPress, you’re ready to start creating your own! As I mentioned above, there are some great free options, but I’d highly recommend starting out with Smart Slider 3, which you can download from WordPress.org.

Smart Slider 3 comes with loads of features and options (including everything mentioned in this article and more). Check out these stunning slider examples and download Smart Slider 3 for free to get started.

Tags: Animation Dynamic content Effect Layers Parallax Responsive

About Author

Raelene Morey is the Chief Bird at Words By Birds , an agency that helps WordPress businesses make better content. Computer science grad turned newspaper journalist and ex-managing editor at WPMU DEV. Raelene has been developing WordPress sites for over 10 years.

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WPBeginner » Glossary » Slider

What is: Slider

A slider is a design element used to display images and videos on your website. It works like a slideshow, showing one image or video at a time. The content changes after a few seconds or when the visitor clicks to view the next one.

Many WordPress slider plugins allow you to place sliders on your home page, landing pages, posts, and almost anywhere you want on your site.

Your slider can change images automatically every few seconds, or you can let your visitors click or swipe to view the next slide.

Many sliders have buttons, arrows, or thumbnails allowing visitors to view specific images or control what they see. Often if you give users more control, they’ll stay on your page longer.

Sliders can help you save space and keep your visitors engaged with eye-catching animations and targeted content.

When Should You Use Sliders?

Sliders make it easy to tell a story or to promote unique features of your business within one small section of your website.

But if you don’t create your sliders with a purpose in mind, you’ll annoy your readers and lose customers.

Remember that every website is different, so what works well for some sites might not work well for others.

Sliders are a great way to:

Before you decide to use a slider, there are a few things to should consider.

Most WordPress sliders are slow . Sliders use a Javascript code called jQuery. This code is used to make the slides move, and each code is loaded separately. As you can imagine, this can slow your website down, affect your SEO , and hurt your conversion rates.

This is especially true if you’re not using a good web hosting company. That’s why we always recommend that you use companies like Bluehost , HostGator , or SiteGround for your WordPress web hosting needs.

Many WordPress sliders are difficult to use . Beginners have a hard time learning how to use most sliders because they’re so complicated.

All WordPress sliders are not mobile responsive . That means that even if you have a responsive WordPress theme, your slider won’t look good on smartphones or tablets. It could even break your whole site layout.

So how do you choose a slider plugin that’s fast, easy to use, and mobile responsive? Well, you don’t have to look beyond this post. We’ve done all the research for you. You’ll find the results of our research about the WordPress sliders below.

We performed tests to find the fastest WordPress slider plugin and compare features. After that, we used Pingdom’s speed testing tool to run the test. You’ll see the results of our test for each slider plugin in the image below.

Not only is it fast, but Soliloquy is also the most beginner-friendly WordPress slider plugin. You can create a new slider and then just drag and drop your images in place.

The Soliloquy slider plugin takes care of other things like resizing your images, choosing a slider theme, navigation style, and more. So, all you have to do is hit the publish button to save the slider.

And Soliloquy is also mobile-friendly, meaning that your images will look great on any device or screen size.

We hope this article helped you learn more about WordPress sliders. You may also want to see our Additional Reading list of related articles for useful WordPress tips, tricks, and ideas.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook .

Additional Reading

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12+ Things You MUST DO Before Changing WordPress Themes

How to Properly Move Your Blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

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What is Web Slide Desk in HTML5 ?

Last Updated : 30 Nov, 2022

WebSlides is an open-source library used to create presentations, landings, tables of content, longforms, and portfolios with basic knowledge of HTML and CSS. You might wonder about the need and importance of WebSlides when we have plenty of stunning third-party applications for this purpose. We can easily infer the indispensable importance of showcasing our skills, ideas, and work across the internet. What if we can design our desired showcasing with the use of a compact, beautiful, and easy-to-use library. Easy design, easiest sharing, and no compatibility issues. WebSlides do this for us!

Approach: We can create WebSlides designs from scratch or customize demos. To explore WebSlides we will create a few slides from scratch. First, we will design two slides individually. Then we will design a third one and combine all of them to make a Web Slide Desk.

Let’s first explore some features of WebSlides.

1. Background: We can add different backgrounds to slides:

And a lot more colors can be used as background by specifying the proper class in the section of the slide. We can place background at different positions on screen by use of appropriate class in span tag for background. Some of the classes are:

2. Wrap: Use a div with the class wrap to layout content and classes work properly. Place content inside this div.

3. Alignment: You can align your content at different locations. you can align it left, right, or centralize it. Also, you can place it at the top or bottom of the slide. Some classes are:

You can use a combination of these classes also.

4. Animations: You can Use different Animations in your content. Just use the appropriate class with the content you want to animate. Classes are:

5. Typography: You can present your content with the use of semantic typography classes. These all classes use Roboto font that’s why we linked to it in the head tag. The text-subtitle class turns text into capital caps. Some typography classes are following:

Steps to design slides:

Here we are linking to Roboto google font and CSS used throughout the slides. Before jumping into the code don’t forget to go through the following key takeaways

Example 1: In this example, we will be going to use:

you’re done with the first slide.

Example 2: Here we are using,

Web Slide Desk

Web Slide Desk is a combination of Web Slides. Let’s create one new slide and then make a deck. Here, we will use the first and second slide, create a new slide and combine all of them to create a Web Slide Desk.

In third slide, we are using,

It is not the whole story! You can do a lot more with WebSlides. Head towards the web slides folder you downloaded. Explore more classes, components, and templates. The ball is in your court now!

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What is the purpose of slideshow web layouts and how can they be used effectively?

I feel like this should be a duplicate but I couldn't find anything. I am trying to reconcile two conflicting observations regarding slideshow-style web sites, or heavily paginated content (which I view as sort of a variant of the same thing):

Example: This Forbes article about the 10 most dangerous power tools .

The frustrations I run into here are pretty representative of my usual experience:

Slow load times : It takes approximately 12 seconds for the content of each slide/page to load. With 10 slides that's 120 seconds of total wait time to read all of the content. Here is one slide:

Often, it takes longer to load to page than it does to read the text that is on it .

Piecewise loading : As the page loads and images, etc. are filled in, at least on Chrome (desktop), the text of the page jumps around on the screen. The consequences are 1) having to wait for the page to load to be able to read the text and 2) disorientation if you interact with e.g. scroll bars while the page is loading.

High overhead : To load the entire contents of this article (front page + all slides), and this is with AdBlock enabled:

Comment confusion: While this particular article has comments disabled, on articles like this it is often unclear if comments are per-slide, or shared by the article as a whole. For the latter, you often see users commenting on the particular slide that they are currently viewing, and these comments don't always make sense in the context of other slides.

These points are for the desktop version. On mobile browsers the issues are often magnified.

Other similar examples include:

Counter Example: This Flickr image gallery

So this isn't to say that they're all bad. For example, Flickr seems to use them appropriately and effectively. Compared to the Forbes article:

Yet there are so many sites with designs like the Forbes example, and there has to be a reason.

Now, compare this to the flat layout of e.g. this BuzzFeed page , which delivers a similar type of content (top N stuff), but on a single page. While load time is heavy, it's still tiny compared to the total load time and overhead of the Forbes article, much easier to read quickly, and aside from the silly topic, a generally pleasant viewing experience.

Another non-slideshow example to compare to is this page , which delivers a "top list" style collection of text content, but effectively does it all on one page rather than as a heavily paginated / slideshow interface.

Trying to come up with some advantages to slideshows, here's what I can think of, none of them are strong:

I can't think of anything compelling.

So my questions are:

It seems to me that the common issues are poor implementation / inappropriate use, not the slideshow / paginated concept itself.

website-design

I can't speak to Forbes and that article, but most sites that present information in this format are trying to maximize their page views, their ad impressions, the possibility of/opportunity for incoming links (which improve search results... more possible pages/content to link to, more opportunities), and the sheer amount of monetizable OTHER content they can cram onto each of those pages. I suspect that these types of sites also stack the loading of the page information so that the ads load FIRST, before the content, making the pages load slowly due to both the amount of content and the fact that the content you WANT comes last.

IMHO, this is horrible user experience and is not at all in the service of the user... but it may be the price we pay for "free" content.

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