#IMAGE CAROUSEL DEFINITION HOW TO#
#IMAGE CAROUSEL DEFINITION UPDATE#

“I want one because they look cool” is not an objective, aesthetics alone don’t make a great website.

#IMAGE CAROUSEL DEFINITION HOW TO#

How to get it right?įirst and foremost you need to identify the type of carousel you're planning on having, and be 100% clear on the objective. This doesn’t include your about page! We don’t segment visitors to secondary content, we segment them into our conversion funnels. We use a navigation carousel to segment the visitors on our home page to the content they’re trying to get to. The example given here is from the Copywritematters website, and is used to segment her visitors by what sort of service they’re looking to use. It should never dominate too much real estate, again their primary purpose is to help people GET to the right content – not to give them the content. Their purpose is to help people NAVIGATE your website, not primarily to showcase content. Navigation carousels are another manifestation that deserve their own classification. However they’re all tied to the one subject: Why would you want to buy this product?. Each one would showcase one of the features/benefits of the product, explain it in detail, then move on to the next. While the trend here is subsiding, they were often commonly (well) used on websites about a single product (such as software). Information carousels should really tell a story, flow on from one to another – not jump between subjects. Here’s an About slide, then a slide on Service A, then another on Service B. But they have no idea what purpose it would fill, so they just chuck random bits of information in there. This is where most of my clients fit in, they think it will be “cool” to have a carousel that moves and flashes and gets attention.

Information carousels showing brand and product information have been a manifestation of content carousels people started repurposing the technology to help users consume a different kind of content – product/service information.

#IMAGE CAROUSEL DEFINITION UPDATE#

This does NOT include your About or Services page… A content carousel should feature fresh content, and update regularly so that return visitors know it will provide them with the latest content to read. However content carousels are exactly that – content! Fresh, consumable, content. They’re really useful for putting the content we want the user to focus on front and center to get maximum attention. They’re often used to showcase some featured or most recent posts, and are a great way to help the user to consume content.Ĭontent carousels are quite often very graphical, they’re attention grabbers. The trend started here, most commonly seen on magazine style website or blogs. I consider there to be three main types of carousels (by type, I mean their purpose): Content, Information and Navigation. To begin with, I think it’s important to clarify the purpose of a content slider – which will help you decide if it’s right for your design or not.

Still, the trend decline will take a while to hit the majority of website owners – and so in this post I aim to answer the question: To carousel, or not to carousel? While carousels are still a very popular tool, I’m actually noticing a decline in their use on larger sites who are often leaders in modern design/layout techniques. But more often than not I think that carousels are wasted real estate, done poorly, and highly unusable. Sure, why not you may say, they look great right? With the gentle animations and dreamy transitions, who wouldn’t want to sit there and admire it. The inclusion of a carousel is probably one of the most common requests I get from clients during design revisions: Since I’m based in Australia, they’re more often called “Sliders”, others call them “rotating banners”. Best practices in carousel design for effective web marketingĬarousels are an extremely popular element on home pages, intended to display a variety of content in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Image carousel definition