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Alternative Slide Shows

Slide show examples: Draggable   DHTLM   Drop-in   Interactive  Maximus

Apart from Front Page 2002 Slide Show, there are many free scripts available offering a wide choice of Slide Shows. Not all the slide shows will be compatible with all the browsers - it is up to you to choose carefully. The Slide show example links show some of the slide show scripts I have come across. If you have any, you care to recommend, please let me know.

The disadvantage of any slideshow, is that the images have to load onto the page. Say, for example, you have ten images in your slideshow - each one being 10kb - that is a total of 100kb that will have to download. This can be done with one of two methods. You can have a script that "preloads" the images, or the images are loaded one by one as required.

Preloading images
A preload script will load all the required images into your viewer's browser cache before the slide show starts. Disadvantage is that your 100kb of images all get downloaded at the same time - people with slow connections will have to wait before the slide show can start ..... will they wait?? One way to keep your viewer occupied is to have the slide show near the bottom of the page with some interesting text for them to read at the top ... while they are reading that, the images are loading. There are some Slide show scripts that will preload a few images at a time, then while playing, other images are being preloaded.

Non-preloading of images
The image will only start loading when the "next" button, or whatever control you have to call the next image is used. If the images in the slideshow also have text underneath, then one of the problems is that the text for the next image can show while the first image is still there, with new image loading in the background.

Slide shows are very attractive, but they need to be used wisely. Have the images compressed as much as possible - calculate the total size of all the images in the slide show - it may be that you will have to use more than one page with slide show on each. Once you have published, see if you can get someone with a slow connection to test for you.

Slide show examples: Draggable   DHTLM   Drop-in   Interactive  Maximus

 
 
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