Most modern web designs include a website slider on the home page to highlight specific pages or promotions on a site. This will consist of 3-5 images (on average) that link to services, blog posts, news stories, and more. If you have a homepage slideshow, you may be a little lost as to what to include in it. Listed below are the top five features to include in a website slider so you can make the most of this powerful design element.
1 – Major Services For Your Business
Think about the reason why most people visit your website. If they come for specific services, you should include links to your services webpage in your website image slider. For instance, if you own a roofing company, you may include a slide about “roof repair” or “new roof installation.” This gives people an instant, direct path to the information they want to see most.
2 – Seasonal Services
If you offer certain services at certain times of the year, promote those at the appropriate time of year. Keeping the roofing theme in mind, you might have a slide for ice dam removal in the winter and gutter cleaning in the fall. Changing out your slides with the season will keep your content fresh, which will ultimately boost your search engine ranking.
3 – Discounts, Specials, And Other Promotions
Running a sale you want everyone to know about? Highlight on your website slideshow. You can update this regularly with your changing promotions and give repeat visitors something new to look forward to. Make sure you get rid of slides for old, outdated promotions so people do not get disappointed with a broken link or invalid coupon code.
4 – Old, Forgotten Webpages
You may also link to old pages on your website that you want to bring new traffic to. It would be wise to spruce up the content in advance so the pages look newer than they actually are. For instance, if you have an old blog post with old statistics, you may update it with new stats relevant to what’s happening right now. Link the posts to other pages on your website so you can create even more opportunities for visitors to explore your content.
5 – Hot Topics And News Stories
Some website owners will put their most recent blog posts or news articles on their homepage slider as another way to promote the content. Doing this can be a little tedious, but you can usually set up an automation system that promotes the posts for you when you tag them a certain way. Otherwise, you will have to create individual slides for each post you choose to promote, which may be a pain if you have multiple posts a week (or a day, yikes!).
Be sure to check out our Top 5 Features NOT To Include In A Website Slider for more inspiration on creating the best homepage content for your website.