Dashboard

For the first glance, you’ll probably notice that everything is super clean and neat, because we’ve cut off the unnecessary functions and UI elements. Then probably you’ll realize the new logo and new saturated blue color behind the top header. We’ve reorganized things around it by putting together options that are related: handy navigation on the left and info center on the right.

Every slider’s got a new context menu and white caption, the new color can help to distinguish them from slides. But these are only the visibles changes, because when you click on the “new project” button then the new slider creation popup comes alive.

Slider

In this view we’ve also removed every noise that can distract your workflow. We’ve merged the two tab sections into one so in the future you will find all the controls (arrows, bullets, thumbnails) under one tab. Probably you first encounter the new parameters here. Every input, button, select, switch and menu have been designed to help your work as easily as possible. With the new grouping you will find every option in minutes and you will see only as much as you actually need.

But it’s not over yet, because we’ve found lots of better ways to express the hard to understand parts. Typical example for this is the responsive sizing, where now you can find a new breakpoint UI instead of the ton of options. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but there is a ton more going on behind the scenes to make it all happen.

Slide

With Smart Slider 3.4, we’re introducing a super massive facelift for the slide editing. This is the most crucial part of the plugin where you’ll spend most of your time. Our goal was to reduce the time it takes to create beautiful slides but much more effectively.

You might notice something missing from the Slide view right now and that’s the top slide background section. One of our next big steps is giving the slide background their own place in the Layer Window. And that’s just the beginning because it will get a complete overhaul. As a result of it you can spot only 3 tabs on the top: content, style and animations. Even more for the better accessibility we’ve added a new layer list into the Layer Window.

Smart Slider 3 allows you to build layouts by adding rows with columns in content mode but you can also add layers absolutely freely in canvas mode. Also, we’re renaming them to Default and Absolute positioning respectively.

One of our best choices is when we dare to step away from competitors and bring you the structured content hierarchy.

In this version we would like to continue to move you in this better direction so the Default positioning default in the future. Don’t worry, the Absolute positioning will stay but it will be so much easier for you if you use it only for decorating and keep the main content in the structured hierarchy. You can save plenty of time when you don’t have to reposition and resize every layer on every device.

Among many changes, we’ve done a lot of work to accomplish a much more convenient layer editing experience. The editor starts to live under your cursor and you get much more visual feedback and control over the elements. We’ve given the label of the layers a new look and behaviour. On the other hand it reacts to the surrounding environment — for example, if you switch to mobile view then a new UI element will appear to help you set the correct font size.

Overall what does it feel like to use it? Shortly, it’s natural but improved. After few slides you won’t ever look back to the previous version.

New Home for Slide Library

Previously the Slide Library was in the add slide process but it could get in the way of a productive workflow. To help solve this, we’ve laid the Slide Library into the add layer panel. From now in the adding process it’s super easy to switch between layers or ready-to-use slides. When you’ve found what you’re looking for, you can just drag it straight onto your slide to start working with it.

We’ve breathed some life into Orion, the first theme of the Slide Library completely re-working its appearance to be up-to-date, and serve your work better. It’s not all! And we’ve extended the theme with more than 100 blocks in dark and light variations to help you get a head start in your next project.

The Best Version of Smart Slider 3 So Far

We didn’t stop there! Along with our headline changes, Smart Slider 3.4 comes with tons of noteworthy features, improvements and fixes:

Breakpoints: Maybe you’re tired of resizing your browser windows to check the responsive accuracy across all devices. For you we would like to provide more flexibility and a better preview of your website. So we’ve added a new slider level breakpoint system with six optional devices where every breakpoint is totally customizable.

Hide Slide: During the slider creation it’s possible that one of your slides contains too many layers which can cause problems on smaller devices. One of the most anticipated features is the hide slide option, which will help you to hide any slide on any device.

Right Click Menu: The new contextual right-click menu is an integral part of the visual builder so we’ve packed it full of exciting options. Once you start using it you’ll be surprised how much better it is to edit the rows, columns and layers. Also we thought it’d be useful in the layer list and in the timeline too.

Keyboard Support: Are you a fan of using keyboard shortcuts in your workflow? Because we added lots of new keyboard hotkeys to help you build faster and more accurately.

Timeline: One of the best ways to bring your design to life is animation. If you start to create any transition then the timeline is essential, so we’ve added a few extra functionalities and advanced the transparency.

Tooltips: The new tooltip system will be able to show you much more details, and direct buttons to tutorials. We added lots of new mini helper guide for the better understanding of every option.

And we’re not done yet. The version 3.4 comes with plenty of small improvements and fixes: new info center for license activation and update, new notification and alert system, new preview, new lightbox and link popup window, new focus point for slide backgrounds, new responsive settings and last but not least new help page.

Frequently Asked Questions

1, Do I get this update for free?
Of course. Smart Slider 3.4 is a free update for everyone with an active license. Because we have only one-time payment plans, you will always get the latest updates automatically for free.

2, What will I get from these feature as a free user?
Most of these features are related to the core plugin so you will get the whole redesigned tool. In addition, you will get a bunch of new things for free: new block type to create awesome heros, access to much more pre-made slide via the Slide Library.

Stay Tuned

Our team has put their blood, sweat, and tears into this update and we hope that you will love it as much as we do. As always, we’re grateful for your feedback – it helps us to create a better tool so we welcome your comments, good and bad.

Smart Slider 3.4 is more than just an update, and now you have the chance to try all the new features we’ve been building in the past year. 🤟

The post Smart Slider 3.4 – Nebula appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/how-to-design-your-slider/ Sun, 19 Apr 2020 07:30:47 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=11205 Let’s assume you have just downloaded the free version of Smart Slider 3 and you are facing the challenge of creating your first or next slider. In the previous weeks I redesigned almost all of our template sliders so I have bulletproof design process to share with you. This article won’t be a tutorial but […]

The post How to Design & Build Your Next Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Let’s assume you have just downloaded the free version of Smart Slider 3 and you are facing the challenge of creating your first or next slider. In the previous weeks I redesigned almost all of our template sliders so I have bulletproof design process to share with you. This article won’t be a tutorial but it will guide you how to design your new slider, block or page with Smart Slider 3.

Sliders help your visitors understand your company, product or brand through images, videos, texts, and interactions. But how can you achieve the best result and create a perfect slider? Simply follow the next 5 points and deliver more successful sliders faster and much more efficiently.

Slider design process in 5 simple steps:

💡 Planning
✂️ Preparation
🎓 Creating Your Slider
🎨 Designing & Building Your Slides
🏗️ Building Tips & Risks

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💡 Planning

Planning is the most critical part of the slider design process. Take your time and identify the slider’s goal in this early, initial stage. If you don’t have the clear goal, you won’t be able to create a proper slider design.

Questions to answer during this step:

a, What is the main purpose of your slider? Informing, selling, or entertaining?
b, What do your visitors expect?
c, What type of slider do you need? Full width slider, carousel, or just a simple block?
d, What will be the content of your slides?
e, How many slides do you need?

Take your time and answer these questions before jump right into the slider settings. It’s really easy to skip the planning stage, but this is critical for creating a successful slider.

Through these answers, you will outline the first concept of the showcase that would fit the client’s specifications.

After you figure out what the project is exactly, you can start to come up with ideas and solutions. At this point, I strongly recommend to take inspiration from our Slider Library. Those examples are all great sources to learn what’s trending now or to get new ideas.

✂️ Preparation

Using the information gathered from stage one, it is time to put a plan together. Visualization can help you organize your thoughts and shape the design of your slider. Nowadays there are several design tools available on the market, but a simple pencil and paper can be surprisingly helpful.

First and foremost, your aim is to create a wireframe then if you need you can move into a realistic mockup using a designing software such as Photoshop or Sketch.

Main points of preparation

Images: Background images have a more significant role in slider design now than ever before. Use high quality pictures and don’t be afraid to try more. It’s very important to find those photos which resonate with your goal and communicate your message clearly.

The best size for a background image is usually the size of your slider.

But the maximum should be around 1920x1080px. The most common background image size that I use is 1920x600px, because it fits very well into a full width slider. On the other hand I like to set the maximum height to 600px because it’s ideal for any content, it’s not too tall and not too short. If you have the exact image, try to compress it as small as possible. For the transparent pictures use PNG8 format and for background images use JPG and try to set the quality as low as possible without radical quality loss.

Content: While the images and effects will steal the show in slider design, you still need a good content. The content includes headings, paragraphs, images, videos, icons, buttons, and multimedia. Fortunately in Smart Slider 3 the most popular content types are available as layers. Your content is the reason why people come to your website and one of the most important parts of the good content is the good copy, because your copy will make or break the success of your slider in terms of trust, engagement and SEO.

Style: Your challenge as a designer is balancing the visual content and information content. A good design should be both pleasing to the eye, and also communicate the key messages to your audience. The really great designers have strong intention behind every decision. Generally the most important aspect of the style is the consistency. Whatever font, color, and icon style you choose, make sure that you use the same decision through all of your slides.

🎓 Creating Your Slider

We’re now at the end of the planning and preparation phase where we can start the actual visual slider design because your slider should more or less get into shape. Let’s sum up quickly what we know or what we have presently:

• Purpose of the slider
• Slider type, slide count
• Design assets (images, videos, icons and so on…)
• Content (with good copy)
• Style (outlines the design of the layers)

Here is the time to turn your vision into a live working slider or block for your WordPress or Joomla website. There are two popular ways to start: import a slider or create a new one.

Import a pre-build template Slider

As a newcomer the most comfortable way to create a slider is to import a ready to use slider from the template library. By one click you can instantly start to discover the slider settings, tweak the layers and play with the animations. When you have got familiar with the interface you will be able to replace the background images, paste your copy and change the style to your own in minutes. The whole process will usually take about 5 to 20 minutes with responsive settings and testing.

Creating a brand new Slider

In this section, I’ll be covering the most important slider related questions, options and design decisions that you have to figure out. However I’ll focus on a normal slider because this is the most common usage. Here are the crucial points to setup the slider correctly:

Slider size: In short, it can be really different because of the nature of the different sliders, but with the 1200×600 px you can’t go wrong. Doesn’t really matter if it’s a boxed, a full width, or a full page slider, this size will be a great starting point.

Slider settings: Smart Slider 3 is one of the most advanced slider plugins on the market so there is a ton of options. For example you should go to the General tab and find the perfect main animation for your slider. This is the only essential animation which will move your slides. On the Size tab you will find every height and width related settings, here I really like to use the maximum slider height. Mostly because on a bigger screen the slider can scale up really big without this setting. Last but not least you should consider to use the slider autoplay.

Controls: Scroll down a little bit and you will find the control settings like the arrows, bullets and thumbnails. This is a key moment to add a good navigation to your slider. The easiest step if you choose an arrow, later maybe you will build your own navigation with layers.

Create an experience: This is the area where Smart Slider 3 starts to really shine. It’s time to think about how you can use animations and effects to truly delight your visitor. Background animation, Ken Burns effect, animated shape divider, particle effect, every type of parallax effect? No problem, but keep in mind less can be more in the world of animations and effects.

In order to this, you will add few slides at first then go back to the Slider options and set the previously mentioned parameters like the autoplay.

🎨 Designing & Building Your Slides

This area is where all of your design assets, content ideas and style concept come into play. Once you’ve created a Slider, you will be able to add different type of Slides. Slides are those elements which have a background and can contain various types of layers. This slide creation part will be super easy for you because you made the background images and videos previously. In 2008 probably it would be the end of this article, because the slider is ready with your images. But in 2018 you’re able to build complex layouts with layers.

Working with Layers

In the free version of Smart Slider 3 every essential layer is available. As a result of this, you can transmute the previously specified content and style into a layer in no time. Every heading, text, image, button and video can be edited easily with the customization options. You can change every detail that really matters in typography and style.

Layer Positions

Smart Slider 3 stands above all of the premium sliders because it comes with two positioning modes which is totally unique: Default and Absolute positioning.

Absolute positioning: It gives you the absolute freedom, because the layers which are in this mode can move anywhere and overlap each other on the slide. This behaviour can be familiar from Photoshop or from every other premium slider plugin. At first glance this mode looks really promising but when the mobile editing comes in the picture, the editing process can be time consuming and far from effective. By default, the canvas mode maintains relative spacing between layers of the slide. So if the slider scales down then the layers also have to scale down to keep every ratio.

Default positioning: To avoid the previously mentioned responsive problems we released the Default positioning in version 3.2. In this positioning you can put the layers below or above each other and with rows and columns you can position them next to each other. The whole approach is closer to HTML structure. With this mode your layers will determine the height of the slider automatically in mobile and every other view.

Default or Absolute positioning?

The proper answer is both. Sometimes you need the freedom or the overlapping behaviour of the Absolute layers but sometimes you need the advantage of the structured content of Default layers in the same slide.

But all in all, try to add every layer with Default positioned layers and use Absolute layers only for overlapping and decorating.

🏗️ Building Tips & Risks

Here are few of my favorite and most useful tips to edit the slides correctly:

Three Fonts Rule

Try to limit the number of font families to maximum 3 and stick to the same ones through the entire slider. Unnecessary fonts make your slider slow, unstructured and unprofessional.

Limit the Length of your Lines

Having the right amount of characters on each line is key to the readability of your slider. The optimal line length for your text is considered to be 60-80 characters per line. Therefore, use bravely the max-width option to limit the width of your layers.

The Power of White Space

Whitespace is the distance between different elements that gives visitors some visual breaks. If used correctly, it can provide many advantages to your slider. For example: better legibility, highlighting a particular element, better user experience and more interactions. In Smart Slider 3 you can easily insert whitespace with various techniques such as margins, paddings, gutters or aligns.

Keep Mobile in Mind

It’s common problem for beginners to design different quantity of content on the slides. For example the first slide contains only a few sentences, but the next one is full of images, paragraphs or buttons. At first, everything looks great on desktop but on mobile the height of the slides can be really variable which results in awkward experience for your visitors. I typically start with a desktop layout first, however I keep mobile in mind from the start.

Try to distribute the content equally among the slides. If one of your slides has too much content, don’t be afraid to hide the unnecessary parts, and just keep the important message on mobile. Smart Slider 3 is full of responsive options and tools which will help you design the perfect slider for mobile and tablet. You can optimize the slides for mobile easily with the following device specific options: hide layer, text size modifier, align, position, size, gutter, padding, margin.

Avoid too Many Slides

My recommendation is to use maximum 5 slides per slider in normal slider scenario. Of course, if you create a product carousel, this number can be so much higher because you can see 3-4 slides at the same time. I think the only exception if you would like to create a gallery slider where your aim is to show plenty of pictures. In that case don’t forget to turn on the lazy loading option and the image optimization, with these settings you can speed up the loading time drastically.

Never Stop Testing

Testing your slider is critical both in the building phase and after you’ve got what you’ve built. Don’t forget to preview your website periodically to make sure the slider works correctly.

Closing

Design is a fluid and ongoing process that requires constant maintenance. Probably you will add new content from time to time or keep the existing content up-to-date. By following the 5 steps above, your slider design process should go more smoothly. What does your slider design process look like? Do you have any suggestions how can we improve the process? Post your ideas in the comments below.

PS.: During the next weeks we would like to write a whole bunch of articles. The topics will cover in-depth guides about responsive settings, slider loading, SEO options and so on. If you are interested, stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter.

The post How to Design & Build Your Next Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/nextend-in-2018-and-the-future-of-smart-slider-3/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 10:40:49 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=14239 It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone. Here at Nextend, we had an extremely busy 2018 and we wanted to take a moment to look back at the major milestones, because so many things have happened this year: two new faces have joined the team (now we’re six), we have released […]

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]]> It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone. Here at Nextend, we had an extremely busy 2018 and we wanted to take a moment to look back at the major milestones, because so many things have happened this year: two new faces have joined the team (now we’re six), we have released a brand new plugin the Social Login, we have published record amount of new contents and on top of that we have rolled out some incredible features for Smart Slider 3.

But before anything else I would like to thank you to all of our customers (that’s you!) who use Smart Slider 3 on all their clients’ websites! We’re thrilled by the amount of positive feedbacks we receive from you and it helps us to continue and make our plugin better and better.

Now let’s take a look back at what we’ve accomplished over this year.

Overview

In this section I’ll try to gather the most interesting statistics, numbers and insights about how we did as a company in the past 365 days.

• Traffic: During this year we had more than 1 million unique visitors from 232 countries and territories, it’s 89% percent increase from 2017. Waoh!
• Support: We closed almost 11.000 support tickets with an annual happiness score of 94%. I’m really proud of our team because this quantity didn’t affect the quality of our support. Just read this review about our support service.
• Updates: Over the last 12 months, we released 1 major and 18 minor updates for Smart Slider. In addition, we launched a brand new plugin, the Social Login with 11 updates.
• Newsletter: The signup number grew dramatically and currently we have more than 70.000 subscribers. We sent 35 newsletters with the latest updates and we earned an average 25% email open rate.
• YouTube: We made 13 new videos and we started a brand new “How to build” series for beginners. Our YouTube channel passed 600.000 video views just in this year.
• Blog: We wrote 31 new articles which garnered lots of new visitors from organic source. Our goal for 2019 is to increase our content output while maintaining the same high quality so make sure to subscribe to our newsletter.
• Templates: The Smart Slider 3 users downloaded more than 260.000 template sliders. The free template sliders are the most popular, but in the premium section the Static Slider and the Fullwidth Slider is the most frequently downloaded.

Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 is our flagship product, and currently it’s running on 300,000+ WordPress websites. It’s the fastest growing slider plugin in the WordPress repository. Even more it has more active install growth than all the other slider plugins together. Here’s a quick summary of our biggest releases from the last 12 months:

• Smart Slider 3.3 – Eclipse: A major upgrade, bringing you the complete re-architecture of our backend system with new caching system and improved JavaScript handling. This version introduced a lot of backend infrastructure changes that helped us improve performance. We can’t forget about other, smaller feature releases like slice background animations, row and column style options, and new slide creation process. This update radically decreases our support tickets because our plugin becomes rock solid in every environment.
• Slider Templates: In 2018 we created 15 brand new slider templates and during the summer we silently revamped all the existing examples (more than 70). Fresh new design, better typography, few slider structure changes and better responsive behaviour because of the content mode.
• Highlighted Heading Layer: We released a brand new Smart Slider 3 Pro layer that you can use to create beautiful text effects and animations. Highlighted heading helps you spotlight the most important part of the heading, delivering your message in the most effective way.
• Animated Heading Layer: This is also a new layer to display different words or sentences which rotate on and on. You can use it for various purposes, for instance, to display more message on the same spot on your site.
• Integrations: In this year we’re focused on better integration across every other WordPress plugin such as Divi, SiteOrigin page builder and Gutenberg.

Aside from the product features, we re-designed our website in more phase. The new home page was featured on many design related site like Landingfolio which makes me super happy. In the final phase we re-launched our brand new blog, help center and pricing page. Last but not least we pushed out dozens of amazing articles, tutorials, and video contents.

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What’s Coming Next Year?

We promise to bring you incredible updates that aim at making your lives easier through simplified WordPress and Joomla website building. We couldn’t be more excited for 2019 and you’ll really like the features we have in pipeline. But here’s a list of our public roadmap:

• Reveal Layer Animation: We’re ready to kickoff the New Year with a complete layer animation improvement and with a brand new type of layer animations. No more hassle with animation options, because everything will be available comfortably in the layer window.

• UI revamp: We would like to laser focus on improvements to the core experience, better parameters, interaction and readability.
• Gutenberg improvement: Another big focus for us is to expand into new territories and we have some really great ideas how to step forward with the Gutenberg integration.
• Smart Slider 3.4 – Nebula: Unsurprisingly, the new major version is on the horizon. We’re already working hard on our next update and we know that Smart Slider 3.4 is going to be another exciting release! We’ll tell you all about it soon in our Community Group.

As always, we love hearing what you’d like from us next year. Your thoughts directly influence what we decide to work on, so please fill our quick survey to help us meet your expectations in an even better way.

Take The 2 Minutes Survey

Overall, 2018 was brilliant

We’ve had fantastic growth and I’m extremely proud of the work we’ve done in 2018. On behalf of the whole team, we wish you wonderful Holidays and Happy New Year!

We’ll be happy to hear what you think. Your opinion really matters to us, so feel free to leave a feedback or a like below.

The post Nextend in 2018 and the Future of Smart Slider 3 – Year in Review appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]>

New Slider Templates

Recently we’ve added 3 new beautifully crafted slider templates that give you an easy way to start with Smart Slider. But this is just the beginning, in this year we would like to release new sliders, blocks and pages much more frequently. We have many more slider demos currently being worked on for future updates that will be free for anyone who has an active license. Hey, if you’re a free version user, you will get access to a bunch of free slider templates soon.

New Slice Background Animations

So far I haven’t been a big fan of the background animations, but with these new slice animations I think it will change. The slice background animations work with a changeable background color and a simple row slice reveal. It’s a super engaging and modern animation effect that gives you the ability to build a better online presence.

Row and Column Style

Currently our most important goal is to move forward into a visual builder way with Smart Slider 3 which would be a perfect plugin to create any kind of sliders or carousels, but also build a block or even a whole page visually. For this reason, we have to implement a plenty of new options to create a full value visual software. As a first step, we added lots of style related options for the row and column elements with normal and hover state.

Divi Module

After few successful cooperations with other page builders, we finally have access to create our own unique module for Divi. Previously we had the backend module but with Smart Slider 3.3 you can add sliders easily with the visual editor too.

Recent News

June already? Time flies. A lot has happened with us and with our company – and there’s a lot more to come. But now let’s see the two most important pieces of news:

200k Active Installs

We are thrilled to reach 200.000 active installs in the WordPress Directory with the free version of the Smart Slider 3, besides that currently we’re the fastest growing slider plugin. All in all, a huge thanks for your trust and support, this is what makes us grow. We would not have made it without our incredible users who are enthusiastic fans of Smart Slider 3.

Nextend Social Login

Two months ago we re-launched our previously really successful and popular WordPress plugin, the Nextend Social Login. If you’re looking for a good free Facebook or Google login for WordPress, then you will love this lightweight plugin. What’s more, finally we have a little time to create extra, long awaited features which are available in the paid version packed with our super-duper support service.

What’s Coming Next?

We’ve always got our eyes on the future of web design, so 2018 will see us working on lots of awesome features. The hardest part is to choose from our infinite to-do list. But this time the choice is also yours. In the following vote you can select the next big feature and share your opinion!

This update took us longer than expected, but it’s well worth the wait. We’d love to hear your opinions on the latest update so please let us know what you think in the comments below! If you’ve got questions or feedbacks, you can get in touch with us via our contact page or join the conversation in our Facebook Group.

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