This theme includes a built-in post slider to showcase featured articles. I would recommend perhaps creating a special (optional) blog category for “featured posts” and then when you choose the category for your slideshow, you can select that one. However, adding a slideshow to your front page can definitely add more for your site visitors to enjoy.
Prepare Images
You have the option to prepare your slide images before uploading, but with this new slider we’ve added, your image will be cropped for you. However, the benefit of doing it yourself is to ensure you get the image cropped without losing something in the subject matter that you don’t want to lose.
Before cropping your photos, you can size them from 1160px to as much as 2560px in width and your height will be 620px. If you crop them yourself, you can strike a balance and crop your images to ensure they are still great looking at 1600x620px:
Slideshow Setup
- Go to Appearance >> Customize >> Slider Options
- To show the slider, look for the “Show Slider” setting and check the box and click “Save & Publish“. This should activate and show the Slider Options tab in the customizer, but if not, refresh your window.
- New with this theme is the ability to manage the width of your slider. This setting will also apply the size to your post slider images when you upload them, this will crop the images to the size you set. Please note that the height will always be 620px.
- Choose the blog category where the slider will grab the posts and featured images from.
- Choose how many slides to show from 1 to 5.
- You can also show or hide both types of navigation. The Slider Pagination are the small centered dots found on the bottom of each slide and the Slider Navigation are left and right arrows that show when you hover over a slide:
- Next, you can customize the colours of the slide content that gets displayed on top of the slide. This will include things like the title, the intro, a read more button, and also the navigational elements:
- Click “Save & Publish“
NOTE: The more slides you load, the longer it will take to load your page…due to the image files.