Today seems to be the day of the Slider.
Perhaps that should be yesterday, but since it is Monday the 14th in Beijing already for me today is the day of the slider.
First I saw the post “Sliders Suck” by Brian Krogsgard.
In the comments Brian admits that he used a bit of hyperbole with the title, but his points about ubiquitous sliders are valid and his readers seem to be in consensus.
One of the commenters, Andy Searless, took his cue and wrote a follow up post titled “How to Make Sliders Not Suck“.
Two very useful points in his article are that if you have to use a slider
- do it then for one content-type only
- and certainly do not use it as an alternative site navigation
Then to top it all up and basically to follow the “if you have to” above, I read an article by Chris Lema in which he compared the performance of 6 premium sliders for WordPress.
I will not give away the results, that would not be fair to Chris, but I am happy to know that I am using the number 1 on one of my sites!
Fortunately I also follow the “new rules” by using it for one content type only and although I have my little slider on the homepage, I am showing it way below the fold, so that is a good compromise I think.
2 Responses to Sliders Anyone?
Hey, thanks for the shout out.
I’m loving all the conversations about sliders. In our office, we’ve been having them for weeks. That’s where I came up with my rules that you talked about. It’s time that we reform the way we think about sliders. We can be more creative instead of just defaulting to using a slider.
Thanks again
a
Thanks for your comment and you’re welcome Andy. I’m all with you on being more creative regarding those “big chunks of content filler”.
To eat my own food so to speak I have just made some radical changes to a mobile framework I am developing, where I broke all your rules.
Instead I have “buried the slider” now in one of the pages to show images of one content type only!
Instead of the slider, the homepage will get a nice picture to lighten up the structure a bit.