Thoughts on the carousel.

[gail]

I have a carousel on my V14.

I have to admit that it went on because ' If Sellerdeck offer it as an option it must be worthwhile'

I've just read stats that say only 1% of visitors click on the carousel and of those 89% click on the first image.

Has anybody done any research themselves on this and do you use your carousel?

[chris ashdown]

Is it really designed as a click through or rather a way to display a wide range of goods without leaving the home page or taking up to much room on the home page

[gail]

Mine is just a click through. Basically duplicating some of the more popular items on the home page.

My reservations about it is that it takes up a lot of physical space at the top of the home page for what seems not much benefit.

It doesn't seem to have affected sales either way to be honest.

I was just curious to get other opinions.

[John Ennals]

I agree with Chris, I see the carousel primarily as an eye-catching display and a means of getting as much pictorial information "above the fold" on the front page as possible. I suspect many visitors don't even realise that the images are clickable.

On that basis I'd definitely recommend using a fairly fast automatic transition rather than manual. On my website I have 2 images displaying at a time, which I think makes best use of the page width. I made all my slider images the same width and roughly the same height to improve appearance and reduce blank space. Also I reduced the height of the carousel a little so that space is used more efficiently and the front page fits nicely on a mobile phone screen.

John

[gail]

John,

Further to your helpful post, how did you get 2 separate images on the carousel that only move half an image (if you get what I mean?).

And how do you get them linked to separate sections?

When I first looked at it first I assumed that the 2 images were simply one large image comprising 2 pictures.

[John Ennals]

Gail,

If you select in the content tree the page fragment that contains the carousel, then select the Marketing panel, everything you want should be there. I have Minimum and Maximum Images In View set to 2, and Images to Scroll set to 1. (You might need to scroll down the panel to see these settings).

John