A nifty carousel is probably the most important gift you can give to your network site. Think of it as an elevator pitch for your network site. Use it effectively to tell a compelling story to the attention deficient visitor.
Most traffic originates on small screens, ie mobiles, and there is limited real estate to catch the visitor's attention. A sliding carousel makes great use of the available space, grabbing the visitor's attention via a few rich slides that scroll on demand or automatically.
The carousel is fully responsive and automatically adapts itself to various screen sizes.
We recommend using this element when the network site doesn't have a full featured landing page. It sits in the prime real estate on the network page, above the fold.
Tips for best visual effect#
- There can be any number of slides, but ideally between 4 and 8 hit the sweet spot - too few and you've missed an opportunity to impact your audience, too many and you've bored them.
- The 1:1 image should be created in an external image editor with dimension at least 800px x 800px. Image should be an illustration with preferably transparent background and not a photo.
- The landing carousel is meant to be as concise and brief as possible - remember less is more. No long winded stories here!
- Slide heading should be short, and strictly limited to 1 single line. Slide heading can be a max of 100 characters.
- Slide text can be 1 to 3 continuous (ie without lines breaks) lines. Slide text can be a max of 200 characters.
- The carousel format works best when all the slides are by and large uniform.
- The carousel maker ensures this automatically with images and also tries to ensure that every slide is of the same size and renders perfectly irrespective of the screen resolution.
- Additionally, try to keep the Slide Heading and Slide Text roughly the same length, ie number of characters, across all the slides. This is of course not mandatory, but good to have.
Landing carousel creator#
The MainCross carousel creator and editor allows for a lot of control of your carousel and the slides that are displayed. The steps briefly are as follows:
- Create (or edit) one or more slides
- Select the slides that should be shown & reorder as necessary
- Check preview
- Launch!
Step 1 - Creating or editing slides
Slides can be individually created or edited as required.
Each slide can be edited as desired - featured image, heading, text and link.
Step 2 - Select the slides that should be shown & reorder as necessary
Now select (drag and drop) 1 or more created slides from the left panel to the right. The carousel is made up of the slides in the right panel, ie the Selected Slides.
You can reorder the slide similarly by dragging and dropping them.
A slide once created is always available to you in the Available Slides panel, and hence can be reused when required without having to recreate at a later date.
Step 3 - Tweak the carousel settings
The slider can be set on auto play.
More configuration options are under development.
Step 4 - Check live carousel preview
Check the live preview of the carousel to visualize how it would finally look.
Step 5 - Launch!
This section controls whether you want the carousel to be live, and whether you'd like to show it even to logged in members. Ideally, the carousel need not be shown to logged in members, since they already know what's its about.
Once you are done with the carousel, make it live in this last step. You will be able to see it on the home screen.
Remember - The carousel will be hidden from you if you have turned on the setting Hide from logged in users, since you are logged in.
