Different Ways To Improve Sliders In Your Web Design
A slider is nothing but a slide-show added to a web page. It helps people stay on the same web page and browse for more options, variations and information relating to a service or product. Sliders are very easy to add and they make the website look neat and assorted. They are customizable and can be modified according to the layout and design of the web page. Adding a slider allows a user to access information and content.
Here Are A Few Ways To Improve Your Sliders:
- They must give the user a tour of their products: Consider an online shopping site, like Amazon. A slider would come very much in handy to them as it would give a description of a product to the shoppers. Various features of the product can be shown in different slides, which makes it easy for the user to understand and remember them distinctively. In such cases, sliders should be used when the information needs to be given sequentially.
Consider a mobile phone being sold on a shopping site and a slider has to be inserted. In this case, different slides containing the information about performance, design features, specifications and a few photos of the device can be included in a slider.
- Highlighting new content and pushing down the older one: This is most effective for news websites. Users who access news online would always like to get fresh updates about what’s going on relating to current affairs. So a slider used in such cases should showcase newer information first and older ones later.
Consider a web page of a channel like BBC news or Discovery. They would always be getting articles and blogs about current affairs. They should make sure that the line-up of new articles and videos are shown first. Recent developments are given much preference.
- They can be used to showcase various portfolios: A single slider can be used to show different types of works. Graphic designers, photographers and web developers can be utilized for such activities. A horizontal slider can be used in this case to make the web page look classier.
- They can be effectively used for narrating a story: Since sliders can contain any number of slides, they are most effective in narrating a story to the user. Users can easily keep switching between slides in order to move on from one page to another. It makes reading an online book or magazine easy and keeps the layout neat. The users would find it more comfortable with a few pictures relating to the story involved.
- They are the best to showcase photo galleries: When a web page has a huge number of photos relating to a blog or article, they can put all of them in a slider instead of just showing them together on one page. Creating such a slider is pretty easy and requires minimal effort. In addition to it, a few words can be added about each picture in order to give a gist of the picture to the audience. Ones maintaining a travel and lifestyle website can make use of this technique as they can upload various pictures of the destinations in one slider so that the users who need to know more about any place can easily switch through pages
- Don’t use sliders to put up ads: It seems like a pretty clever idea in order to increase the number of ad views per page. But this makes the users irritated and they would refrain from using the website too often.
- Don’t add a lot of unwanted information: A slider shouldn’t be considered as a dumping yard for all the extra information which has no other place to be put at. Only the information that the users expect from the website should be included in the slider. It should be to the point and mustn’t include information related to other topics.
- Actions speak louder than words: This is absolutely true when it comes to online blogs. A slider must include a video if possible so that the users can spend their time effectively by watching a video rather than reading about it. It also reduces the number of slides that the slider would include, making it look compact.
Few online websites prefer the usage of sliders, while few others don’t. It is said that most of the times, a slider goes unnoticed as users are busy browsing for other information. It is also said that sliders hinder search engine optimization as they mainly concentrate on slides including pictures and videos rather than content.
However, including all the above tips would definitely increase the effectiveness of a slider and people would be more inclined towards them. Sliders surely are an effective means of feeding the information to the users.