Big commanding full page slider as LibreOffice’s home landing page
A new trend that is picking up steam is the use of full page backgound images and responsive full-page slides. As sliders become ever more accomplished and compression of images improve, fullpage mages abound – see Newsweek for some great examples. So instead of special event, or short term splash pages, full page slider are taking the heavy load and are becoming home landing pages for more sites. And why not?
Make a full-page banner ad for your total site avoiding strip banner blindness. Because its a slider you can have a Visual Sitemap for your whole site that can help lure in customers. Because its a slider, you easily change the order of the slides or add a special event slide at anytime. Because it is a slider, it will be responsive and look good on any PC or mobile device screen. Because its a modern slider it will fit on a mobile device and offer swipe and other touchscreen operations. Because its a slider, you can programmatically switch to the regular home page for further user browsing after entry. Or maybe not.
There are a number of sliders that are available with all of the above features. However, there are only a few that add full-page image capabilities – sometimes called background sliders. Here is a site featuring some very clever full page slider designs like the one shown below:
Marco Rotoli’s Portfolio site – note the use of a secondary vertical slider in the upper right
There are few commercial full page-width sliders; and here is one pretty good and free full page slider as WP plugin well worth trying out.
As big images are handled by ever increasing Web bandwidth and speed, expect to see full page sliders splash all over the Web. With the right design, full-page images and sliders are great attention getting and idea selling tools.