What do you think of sliders?

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jwithnell

jwithnell

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I'm in the midst of a redesign for our website. "Current" thinking avoids sliders because they can be data-hogs and confuse your message -- that a website should only have one message, "above the fold." But what I'm seeing online are some very attractive sites with sliders that display very well, even on a smart phone. To keep consistency with our current website, I'll be using the same key message points on the landing page. The question is whether I'd have them displayed via slider, or via folks scrolling down. (Which would also put any special, changing displays for VBS, etc. way down the page.) Squarespace responsive design enables you to put critical info (address, map, phone, a message bar) where it is instantly available, so regardless of design, your visitor doesn't have to dig to find this kind of info. Thoughts on slider, vs. scrolling?
 
I was prepared to discuss the properties of White Castle burgers based on the thread title.
 
Are you thinking about your church website?

Thinking as a marketer, I will say it depends on whether you have (1) a single main point you're trying to get across or (2) several offerings, one of which you are hoping will catch a viewer's eye. Sliders are still good for something like a news magazine, where the point of coming to the site is not to learn about the magazine itself but to see if some interesting news catches your attention.

An organization like, say, The Gospel Coalition, might choose to use sliders effectively. This is because few viewers of that site are looking for information about the coalition itself. Rather, they might be looking to catch up on a variety of the coalition's offerings. One slide could tout uncoming conferences, the next could tout the blog (or individual posts), the next could invite a search for network churches, etc.

Some churches operate much the same way. They see themselves as the sum of the many programs and services they offer.

But a church that finds its distictives not in the variety of programs it offers but rather in the type of church it is—that’s more of a single-message church. In that case, I would prefer to define that single message and hit it clearly, without the distraction of other messages popping up or sliding in. And yes, "above the fold" is critical. Make sure the single message appears there on all sorts of devices.

Most new church visitors check out the website before their first visit. Unless a church is aiming to attract those in search of program-heavy options, a single and well-defined message explaining what makes the church distinctive is usually wise. That way you attract the kind of people who will thrive in your church.
 
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BGF said:
I was prepared to discuss the properties of White Castle burgers based on the thread title.
Click to expand...

I also thought it would be about yankee hamburgers, but was going to make a snide comments about knuckleballs.

As to the original post. I don't like them (if I understand what the term encompasses) but that may be a personal preference. I do know they are a current fad for 'cool' sites. And apparently, I'm not alone:

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/auto-forwarding/
http://searchengineland.com/homepage-sliders-are-bad-for-seo-usability-163496
http://erikrunyon.com/2013/01/carousel-stats/
 
I will add that sometimes an inability to boil the church's distinctives down to a single, simple phrase leads to multiple messages, which might show up on a website as a series of sliders. This is seldom the best path. Though it can be difficult to satisfy everyone, a church's elders really ought to work toward stating the distinctives in one simple and short phrase (which can then be expanded as appropriate). Having that clear statement will help a web designer immensely.
 
Our church uses them to advertise upcoming events, although they don't appear to autoscroll any more.
 
I find sliders annoying, but understand their use on, for example, news websites.
But I also hate videos more than most people do, so my preference for static features might not be worth much.
 
OK, and I seriously thought this thread was going to be about little hamburgers. I am really out of it today.
 
Thinkingaloud said:
War_Eagle said:
BGF said:
I was prepared to discuss the properties of White Castle burgers based on the thread title.
Click to expand...

I was ready to discuss a 90's sci fi TV show.
Click to expand...

Ha! The Sliders tv series was the first thing that came to my mind too. Used to be one of my favourite programmes at the time
Click to expand...

The professor guy was on Glenn Beck the other day. He's in the new Hiding Place movie. Sliders was great when it was episodic, with a different story each week. But when he left, they started to add multi-episode story arcs and conspiracies and evil sliders and it all went downhill. Same thing happened with Person of Interested and Burn Notice. Both of them suffered when they started to add shadowy-quasi-government-group-trying-to-take-over-the-world conspiracy stuff. But I digress.
 
I just got here, but I would certainly cast my vote against sliders. To me static features seem more professional and it is clear that this site values substance. Sliders, video, interactives, and the like strike me as cheap gimmicks.

But that is just my take on things.
 
Thanks everyone!

Our church has had a really good response to our current content, which includes sliders. Many times, people have visited and started talking about what they learned on the website, not realizing my involvement with it. An update with Squarespace, the increasing share of our site visitors using mobile, and a desire not to look "so 2012" are all driving our redesign.

With the gallery settings at Squarespace, I can easily change between the slides and stacked, scroll-able images. So I think I'll start with the static and gauge the response. I can add click-through urls to the images to direct people to content, so site metrics might let me know something about the interaction people are having with the opening images. My pastor's instruction is to emphasize that we are a church in Leesburg, Virginia,so that will be what folks see above the fold. (Local identity was a huge part of the original design.)

Sorry about the hamburger reference :) Hope everyone wasn't expecting lunch.

I don't have any problem with clickable videos. I detest videos that start running on their own.
Click to expand...
Complete agreement! Some apps will let you change the settings to prevent auto start-up.
 
For what it's worth, the current site displays like this "above the fold" when I visit it via my laptop. It doesn't scale much better for Android devices, either. Making that first glance more appealing, either by adjusting the content at the top or using a theme that scales better, was the chief design concern I noticed.

Leesburg.jpg
 
BGF said:
I was prepared to discuss the properties of White Castle burgers based on the thread title.
Click to expand...

I was beyond prepared. I was excited! Now I feel let down. This whole internet thing is a fad anyway, but hamburgers are eternal.
 
Thanks Jack! That's a reminder to use emulators and to keep my tablet on hand. It loads well on my android smartphone, but definitely has room to reduce the padding around the banner and navigation. (Though I'm concerned about going too far -- in the past Opera wanted to over run items, but that is definitely a minority browser with our site visitors.) BTW, I am losing the script on the photos -- way too fussy. I'll likely keep the Proxima Nova that is the default heading font for everything else, and closely relates to what we used initially on the site. I'll use the script in larger, stand-alone page headers. Leesburg is a colonial town (named for RE Lee's father) and many of the founding documents for our nation were secured here during the war for 1812. The script captures some of that.

This whole internet thing is a fad anyway, but hamburgers are eternal.
Click to expand...
You'd appreciate my horror at a reception when I realized that the "slider" I was eating was the vegetarian alternative, made with beans :0
 
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