A Deck of Slides in Review

Have you ever encountered a situation where you discover that you have too many photos to use on your blog posts or website?  And to add to your dilemma, all of the photos are good ones.  That’s a good thing to a certain extent, but if you were to inundate your site or blog post with too many photos, it might take too slow to load and it will most certainly drive readers away.

I, for one, do have a tendency of ending up with too many photos, and I’m happy to say that I have finally found a great solution to displaying all of those photos in a neat and professional manner.

It’s called SlideDeck and I’m glad to have stumbled upon it, and here, I’m gonna let you know how I think SlideDeck is a excellent companion to have on any blog.

I downloaded the Lite version a few days ago (which is free) and have been playing around with it.  Slide Deck works as a WordPress plugin so installing it was a breeze, straight from the Plugins menu on the WordPress sidebar.  It is a jquery slider plugin, which enables between 3 to 10 embedded slides to be displayed in a “sliding” manner, for want of putting it in layman’s terms.  The slides can consist of anything at all: images, text, PDF files; think of it as having your very own slideshow on your website.

Here’s what you can do with this plugin:

• Create a Recent Posts slidedeck to display posts that were recently published.
• Create a Featured Posts slidedeck to display featured posts.  Once the plugin is installed, there is a little box beside each post which allows you to mark the post as a Featured one, should you choose to do so.

Both Recent Posts and Featured Posts slidedecks can be created using the Smart SlideDeck option.  Here’s a slidedeck I created for some Featured Posts from my blog:

[SlideDeck id=’3201′ width=’100%’ height=’390px’]

Not too bad, eh?

Other things which I think SlideDeck would prove useful for:

• Headers in Websites or Blogs
• Photo Montages
• Pictorial step-by-step for recipes or tutorials
• Cartoons
• Online Presentations

The created slidedeck can be placed anywhere on the blog/site, or even inserted directly into the template files.  It is definitely a unique and professional way of sprucing up your website.

I wished the fonts and font sizes on the slidedecks were customizable though, because I find that sometimes they seem too big.  Well, perhaps they are…in SlideDeck Pro. Heh…

Have you heard of SlideDeck or are you currently using it?