Day Eight: I love sliders. I praise thee White Castle for your little, delicious, greasy bags of sliders, but hold the cheese, and hold that thought, for we’ll focus on website sliders for the time being. I’ve had two conversations with clients last week, one in Madison and the other in Milwaukee, about why website sliders, also known as carousels, don’t work. But I’ll be the first to admit, in addition to White Castle sliders, I do like website sliders but for all the wrong reasons.

Back in the day of sliders, it would provide web text writers like myself the opportunity to create four or five highly creative messages and propositions designed to highlight a company’s propositions, advantages and benefits. But the reasons to design your next website without sliders are too numerous to avoid. Test after test, from Jacob Nielsen to Notre Dame University, clearly show that click-through rates for sliders are 1% and of that 1%, almost all are for the first slider image. There’s almost no interest for sliders, and no interest for sliders after position one. Do you really want to surrender a huge portion of your home page to a design technique that doesn’t yield conversion? Of course you don’t.

And as they say in the infomercial business, “But wait, there’s more.”

1. In advertising, I’ve always believed he who proves too much ends up proving nothing at all – sliders accentuate this belief.

2. Usability findings dictate that the user needs to be in control, their control is limited with sliders.

3. Sliders affect load times and that can be troublesome in our inpatient world.

4. Abandoning sliders will force you to develop power messaging that you can change-up on a monthly basis. This will help you with your search engine optimization, not to mention developing your new marketing propositions.

There are plenty of alternative website design techniques to sliders, but there’s no substitute for those other mouth –watering sliders.