Among the most popular of web design trends over the past few years has been the use of sliding horizontal panels, known as carousels and sliders. These implementations range from simple eye candy to full-blown gallery sites and everything in between; with a wide range of frameworks available to make crafting your own slider easy.
But as a fairly mature technology, not all sliders are created equally; with the growing demands of mobile consumers fueling the need for responsive designs.
No Flash is required and the script will gracefully degrade to a pure CSS slider for full support of all browsers on all devices — including support for the latest touch/swipe enabled mobile displays.
According to its publisher, WOW Slider (www.wowslider.com) is a responsive jQuery image slider that provides an effective method of increasing a website’s usability and engages the user with special visual effects; including Domino, Page, Rotate, Blur, Flip, Blast, Fly, Blinds, Squares, Slices, Basic, Fade, Ken Burns, Stack, Stack vertical, Basic linear, Cube and Seven; accompanied by numerous professionally made templates.
WOW Slider provides users with an easy point-and-click wizard that creates quality sliders without coding or image editing. There is a WordPress slider plugin and Joomla module available for users of those popular publishing platforms — and users can share their sliders on Facebook, for the widest possible exposure.
No Flash is required and the script will gracefully degrade to a pure CSS slider for full support of all browsers on all devices — including support for the latest touch/swipe enabled mobile displays.
The clean and valid markup produced by this software solution is both search engine friendly and lightweight, coming in between 4-12Kb, depending upon the options.
Optional features include the ability to add descriptions and previous/next controls, plus bullet navigation and customizable speed, delay and size etc. adding to its versatility.
This versatility is further enhanced through WOW Slider’s feature-packed Wizard, which provides the ability to sort, rotate and resize images with point-and-click ease and easy tweaking of all parameters with no coding required. Visual insert-to-page and drag-and-drop images, along with Flickr and PhotoBucket support and the ability to add a logo or watermark to slides add to the benefits — as does the built-in FTP client and interface that supports more than two dozen languages.
A collection of video tutorials and other resources make getting up and running with WOW Slider as painless as possible, while the easy access to such robust customization — even for the most neophyte of operators — make this a viable option, even in the face of its many free competitors, including simple scripting accessible to entry level coders.
Numerous examples of feature rich gallery applications built with WOW Slider show the diversity of styles the script can produce, while providing inspiration for designers.
One strike against the system is its lack of support for video content within sliders, which may pose a substantial drawback to those adult webmasters seeking a more video friendly slider solution, although audio files can be used to provide a soundtrack.
Available for Mac and Windows, a license fee is required for commercial use, which includes the option of removing the WOW Slider.com credit line as well as the ability to place a custom logo on the user’s images. Prices start at $69 for a single site license.
