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Show us your slides

The benefits of some website features can be swings and roundabouts... but slides are here to stay! Here’s to the power of the slideshow!

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Hi everyone, Zarte here. Welcome back! Could you just give me a minute? I’m putting together a playframe for a younger relative. I’ll be with you shortly...

...OK, and I’m with you. The playframe? Oh yeah, you know, just one of those mini climbing frames – tunnel, and a swing, and a slide, all that stuff... actually... a slide. That totally gives me an idea, not at all related to an entirely fictitious device used to shoehorn article topics in! So this article is going to be all about why you... well, your website, should be embracing slideshows and making a feature of them!

For the uninitiated who are presently imagining us shining a series of slides onto a projector screen of your website at all time, a slideshow is very simply the modern version – a simple section of your website with a series of pictures loaded into it, which either change themselves at regular time intervals or can be scrolled along at the leisure of the browser.

But why would you want one? Well they can be used for a number of purposes depending on the nature of your business, but the simplest explanation would be that it’s an easy way of displaying your experience or products in an easily digestible way that looks more stylish than just having a page of pictures. Furthermore, when you have creative control over exactly which pictures feature in such an arrangement, you can show exactly the side of your business that you want to show at any given time to people. For instance a business that has slightly different arrangements for different times of year could show their wares from previous seasons without the need for intense manual rearrangement.

Moreover, a slideshow can be kept on the front page of a website, or either as a floating component of more than one page, meaning that there’s no need for a customer to actively hunt for a demonstration of your work, it’s right there, plainly before them, making them more likely to remain engaged by your website, and ultimately purchase your product.

Stylistically, they’re also preferred to the aforementioned page of pictures, which is more likely to be viewed now as a photo dump. Image is always important, and the fact is that more and more people know how they expect a website to look and perform – pictures either belong with the specific products they pertain to, or in an easy to grasp format such as a slideshow. The time for “pictures of our work” for page has been and gone.

There’s also a technical reason why slideshows are beneficial. We mentioned previously in our recent email about the top web design trends of 2018 that two of the key points would be to make the most of web features, but also code minimisation. Using a slideshow in lieu of having a colossal number of individual photos in a dump is a good way to minimise code, and to recap, has the benefit of meaning your website has much faster page loading speeds, which means you won’t lose the impatient potential customers who can’t be bothered to wait for a page to load fully, but also improves your search engine optimisation, meaning your potential customers are more likely to find you in the first instance when searching for keywords pertaining to your business. Both of these are really key points and their significance cannot be underestimated.

So – convinced now that you should be adding a slideshow to your website? If you are, then why not get in touch and see if we could help you make it happen.

And if you’re still NOT convinced, you should give us a call too. One of our staff will be happy to make things clearer for you – you’ll come round to our way of thinking eventually!

Until next time,

Zarte