Slideshow is a series of still images delivered one after another. Slide shows in their original meaning were the series of slides shown using slide projectors. But in recent years slideshow is mainly associated with computers. Digital slideshow has become the important part of web design. It's not surprising because web slideshow is a great way to turn common digital images into an eye-catching "movie" and make website visitors remember your site at the first glance. Nevertheless, photo slideshow can be not only eye candy. It can be a marketing tool for the best representation of your company products, an educational method, a way to attract attention to one's blog or social network profile and simply to save memory about the brightest moments of life.

The main things you need to create a slideshow are a great idea, a batch of digital photos, sound track (either music or voice record) and a good slideshow software. Regardless of what your slideshow is designed for, your slideshow creator should have the following features:
 

• Slide transition effects. A transition effect is how a slideshow moves from one slide to another. This feature may be unnecessary for an educational slideshow, but if you create a slideshow for your blog or MySpace slideshow, slideshow of your child's birthday party or honeymoon photos - transition effects will be of great use. They make slideshow more vivid, add personality and dynamism to your "photo story".
• Text. Text comments, titles, captions or even date the picture taken on give more details to a slideshow, especially if it has no voice comments. Maybe your wedding slideshow doesn't need titles on each slide, but it's difficult to imagine promotional or educational slideshows without a text.
• Hyperlinks. This feature is indispensable for creating promotional slideshows. For example, you create a slideshow of your company's products. It's great if you're able to assign hyperlinks which will redirect users to the products' web pages. As you see, it's better if your slideshow creator allows to assign not only a total URL to the whole slideshow, but also to assign different URLs to each slide.
• Navigation buttons. Ability to add navigation buttons (Play, Pause, Next, Previous) is a great feature which can be of use for every slideshow type. It gives your audience more control for better perception of your slideshow content and for its convenience.
• Sound. Adding background sound is an important feature regardless of slideshow's aim. Event slideshows can't be perfect without a corresponding music, educational slideshows and business presentations are mainly accompanied with sound (e.g. voice comments).
• Timing control. Timing control means that your slideshow maker allows you to control how long each slide displays. It's really necessary when you add a background sound with voice comments or narration. In this case timing control helps you to synchronize pictures with comments. Even if slideshow has no background sound, timing control is very useful - it enables you to show one image longer than another, choose how long a transition should last, etc.
• Speaking of web design, we must consider not only how to make slideshow, but also how to embed it into a web page. Thus, your slideshow creator must allow both easy creating slideshow and easy web publishing. And its key feature is making web-ready slideshows which can be added to a web site without programming skills.

As an example of slideshow creator which has all these features and allows creating Flash slideshows and publishing them to the Web without Flash experience, try FlashSlider software. It has 110+ cool transition effects, allows adding titles, music and navigation buttons, assigning hyperlinks and much more. FlashSlider generates ready to publish online swf slideshows or html slideshow. Download free trial right now and enjoy creating your own slideshows.

Read more about FlashSlider features