Web Design Extra Spotlight – Slide Show

Web Design Extra Spotlight – Slide Show

The image slide show is a series of large images that slide in one after another.  It is usually found at the top of a page but a smaller one can be effective in a pages content as well.  It can be done in Flash or JavaScript.  Flash slides shows have more effects and use less computer resources, but jQuery will work on substandard mobile devices that don’t have Flash (Apple is the only company that does this on modern devices, but many older ones don’t have flash).  We’ll do either with up to 5 images that you provide for $75.  We can create the images for you from scratch and/or by using stock photography.

Examples:

Nicky’s Diner
A restaurant web site needs to show three things: Where they are, what they sell and what the inside looks like.  A slide show is a great thing for this.  This one also has a photo of the outside of the building which is great for all brick and mortar businesses.  People have a better shopping (or dining) experience) when they find the place easily and a picture helps them recognize it instead of driving past it and having to turn around.

CheapWebDesign1.com
Yes, that’s this web site.  We use our slide show to feature products, specials and provide easy access to our examples.  When considering the design of a slide show, one must remember to not put too much information on each slide, as each one is only viewable by a small (customizable  of course) amount of time.

St Petersburg Web Design
That’s our main web site.  On this website we choose to use our slide show to focus entirely on examples.  Actually we a re reconsidering this plan, as we have so m much more to say there than “Look what we’ve done!”

Other Benefits:

Study after study has shown that people respond better to marketing material with pictures of faces in it.  Even more effective is if they look like someone they would really find n your business (ie’; they don’t look like a model) and look friendly and/or knowledgeable.  A slide show is a great place to put a picture of your employees or even the owner!

You’ll be surprised to learn that a JavaScript based slide show can be very helpful to your on page search engine efforts.  Each image has an Alt tag and that’s a great way to pass a keyphrase to a search engine.  Just be careful to use SEO best practices.  But hey, that’s what we are here for.  This is the kind of stuff that’s included, for free, in our Basic SEO Package.

Are Slide Shows Effective?

The short answer is almost always.  For example, a hip and trendy new restaurant for example should probably have something that’s flashy and modern on there web site, like the slide show we created at the top of Nickys-Diner.com.  Can it be shown via an ROI analysis that it converted more users?  Actually yes, but since your in the market for cheap web design, this kind of analysis and testing probably isn’t for you.  It does add to the ambiance of the restaurant and we all know that pictures of a restaurant and it’s ambiance is important to it’s marketing efforts. I’d say that slide show was $75 well spent, wouldn’t you?

Would this same add on be effective for another type of business, say a plumber or roofing company?  Actually I think it would be a great idea to place some pictures of happy customers, images describing offers, photos of previous work done on homes or even pictures of some modern equipment there.

Is this add on right for every web site?  Of course not, but in most cases the slide show add-on is a great idea.