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Why you shouldn’t have a carousel on your home page(thetomorrowlab.com)
almost 8 years ago from Ryan Van Gatten, Developer
Sherizan Sheikh, almost 8 years ago
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of carousels either. The reason why it existed in the first place was because we had the "above the fold" mentality. This has changed over the years. We accept scrolling down and viewing more content thanks to the way we view websites on mobile. But sadly it has still being overused to this date especially on e-commerce websites.
There are much more improved carousels that uses purely CSS with a touch of animations to give some life to the carousels.
Not calling you a terrible designer but just that the article fell short.
matt michelson, almost 8 years ago
We have a similar blog policy where I work. I dread it more than anything else. My condolences.
Original post author here.
First of all, what a difference to hacker news!
Anyway, I've read the comments here and want to reply with my 2p.
You should know that we have a blogging calendar at work. Each member of staff is expected to write one blog post per month to keep the digital marketers happy. That means we don't always spend the time to craft a well-researched, carefully nuanced post.
The other thing you should know is that the blog is aimed at clients. We occasionally do stuff that appeals to other designers/developers solely to get the attention of people working in house so they can use it and, the thinking goes, hire us if they ever need to outsource, but mostly the blog is unapologetically for clients. Ergo it gets dumbed down.
Having said all that, in response to @Riho, where you said, "it doesn't mean this type of solution doesn't work at all for anything" I also said that in the conclusion of my post.
@Kevin those are some interesting claims, and I would love to see a case study on that. I would be the first to get it on twitter as I loved being proved wrong! If you do ever write it up please let me know @derekjohnson.
@Bryce I chose random carousel code from github as most carousels I've seen implemented are powered by jQuery. Your point about the majority of sites loading it anyway is factually wrong. Only 30% of sites use it.
@Sherizan You are 100% right. I am a terrible designer. In fact I'm not even a designer. I'm a frontend developer who cares most about usability, accessibilty and performance.