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Website Slideshows
Slideshows help you tell the complete story on your website and add a nice pop for your
website visitors. By deciding on which picture you use in the slideshow you can
set the tone for your website design. Regardless of
whether your website is a personal homepage, a blog, or a professional business
site, you will want to add at least one picture widget or video widget.
Most slideshows are actually a flash program and the slideshow
is saved as an swf file. Different slideshow programs
allow you to either store all the information on your
website or have the actual slideshow stored on a remote site and
it opens and plays by the viewer clicking a button.
In deciding what type of slide show you want to have on your
website, you will need to begin by deciding what the primary
purpose of the slideshow is. Some website designers use a
slideshow or other flash object as a part of the front page of
the website to encourage viewers to browse the site. Slideshows
can be used as the the main logo for a website, as a fun visual
website feature, as an entertaining way to share information, or
to sell ads or tell a story. On sites like
Innovative
Improvements, a flash slideshow is used to describe the
website using both words and pictures. Other sites such as
Simply Art, use a
slideshow to display their artwork.
Black History
used a slideshow to get the interest of its viewers, and
California Nature
used a slideshow instead of logo at the top of their pages. Some
sites, like
A Plus
Events may use a slideshow on their photo page instead of
their front page.
When Website Creations develops slideshows for websites, we use
two main programs.
Flash Slideshow
Maker is a Flash album creator to make animated photo slide
show with SWF file as the output format. It transforms your
digital photo collection to Macromedia Flash file format ( SWF )
which you can share your memorial moments with your family or
friends on your own homepage, post on your Blog or upload to
your own website. Flash Slideshow Maker is the ideal tool to
create slide show widgets for your website quickly and easily. I
was a little wary of downloading a free sample from the
internet, but it was safe and no viruses were attached. After I
tested out the program, I went ahead and purchased it and they
email you the registration number to register the slideshow.
One of the nice features about this slideshow program is the
ability to have seamless cuts from photo to photo, like at
Reflections. It is
also the slideshow creator used at Simply Art.
The other slideshow program we often us is
CU3OX. With CU3OX you can
create an attractive image slider with cool 3D slice effects and
transitions between slides. You'll be able to divide your images
into any number of pieces and rotate them the way you like!
CU3OX uses the Tweener engine, which makes it support several
tween types for the transitions, such as Cubic, Bounce or
Elastic. Use CU3OX to create content slider, image galleries,
image & banner rotator for your website. We used CU3OX to
create the slideshow at the top of the page. It is not only a
simple slideshow to use and add to your website, it also has
some unique features. You can set the slideshow to "bounce" as
it turns, and decide how many section you want your slideshow to
have. This slideshow application also allows you to decide if
you want it to turn top to bottom or left to right.
There are numerous free slideshow applications that you can also
use. The downside is that many of them are free but attach ads,
which give the slideshow an unprofessional appearance.
If you have photos stored on online sites such as Photobucket
and Fickr, you may want to try using their free slideshow
applications. Other websites allow you to use a slideshow widget
to advertise items. Both Red Bubble and Imagekind have widget
you can add to websites to help sell your work.
When creating a slideshow be sure to choose your pictures
wisely. After all the slideshow can never look better than the
photos you use to create it.
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