Banner slideshow

A banner slideshow on your front page is a eye-catching way to present the key aspects of your site.  An AlbanyWeb slideshow can be made up of simple images or a combination of images, text and links.  Because this is an extra feature, we customise our slideshows to each customer's requirements, so every slideshow is a little bit different.

When not to use this article

Note that this article applies to a banner slideshow on your front page.

  1. Another type of slideshow is one within a blog post or page to handle a large number of images tidily - in that case, don't follow these instructions, simply insert images as normal, and they will automatically convert to a slideshow whenever there is more than one image.
  2. Sometimes we may collect the information for a slideshow from content you already have, in which case you do not need to do anything special to manage the slideshow information.

Working with slides

On your site, there is a special content type for the slides in your slideshow.  Typically the content type will be called Slide, or something similar.  You edit the slideshow by creating, editing and deleting items of the Slide content type.  In many ways this process is similar to working with the other types of content you are already familiar with: see the instructions for adding a page, editing a page and deleting a page.

There are a couple of important differences when working with slides:

  1. When creating and editing a slide, you will see a box labelled "Order".  Enter a number to dictate which order you want the slides to appear (lower numbers come first).  If this box doesn't appear on your website, that mean we have created an automatic sorting of the slides, so you don't need to worry about it.
  2. If you want to edit or delete a slide, first you need to find it!  There are two options:
    1. Use the view all content page.  You might like to filter by content type to see only slides.  Click the button to edit the desired slide.
    2. Navigate to the page containing your slideshow.  Activate the slide you want to edit.  Hover your mouse over the gear icon in the top right corner and click edit.

Considerations for adding images to a slideshow

  • Think about the number of images per slideshow.  Too many images in your slideshow can cause your site to really slow down, especially if someone is viewing it on a small device.  For big banner slides that you are using for marketing, for example, more than about 5 just causes boredom in the visitor. 
  • Use the correct aspect ratio.  The slides will be automatically cropped to fit.  Sometimes it works better to crop the image yourself, because you can tell better than the computer can which bits are important.  We are also very happy to help you with your images or advise of how to use image editing software, so feel free to send us a support request.
  • Simple subjects with uncrowded backgrounds tend to look better.  Focus your image on a face or single element to get the most dramatic visual effect.  A very busy image can just get lost.

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