When it comes to judge about a website we usually take a number of factors into account. We look at its content, layout, speed, navigation, colors, images, font and readability, etc. These aspects do matter when we first come across a particular website, but there’s still one simple, yet very important thing, that we do pay very much attention to. This simple thing is user experience, because, after all, it’s our experience on the website that forms either positive or negative attitude towards it. There is a number of factors that matter for a good user experience on the website, and fortunately every website owner has full control over them. You can make the user experience on your website better by providing useful, valuable and accessible content in a simple and optimal way.
If you are intentional about improving the user experience on your website and want to better serve your visitors, below are three highly functional FREE WordPress plugins that are here to help you. You can find a detailed description for each of them and get the overview of the functionalities they provide.
Slider WD
I literally have no doubt that a lot of bloggers and website owners have a plenty of good content to share with the targeted audience. The thing you should also care about is the way you show your content to visitors so that they don’t miss out your best posts, articles, updates, etc. The way you choose to provide your content to your website visitors can have a major impact on the user experience. The best way to deliver your most important content up front and show what you have to offer to your visitors is to install this WordPress slider plugin. This highly responsive and user friendly slider plugin can be added also as a widget and will take care of your content to be easily noticed by the visitors. It is highly customizable and has plenty of functions and features to make the user experience on your website better.
With Slider WD plugin you can create unlimited number of slides and sliders and add images to them either from your media library, Slider WD Media Upload (multiple images at once), or by using the image URL. It comes with 5 transition effects and support for music playback. You can provide titles for the slides, choose their order and set time for effect changes. It has an option for custom CSS, text and image watermarking possibility, slide duplication option and right click protection. Those who want to have a slider on their websites, this plugin is definitely a must-try.
Event Calendar WD
If you own a blog or a website the chances are you’d organize different events for your readers and website visitors. This is a really good way to keep in touch with your audience. If your visitors like the events you organize and are eager to know about them first, then you can provide them the opportunity to keep abreast of the coming events. It will result in better user experience and better engagement with your audience. This WordPress calendar plugin is developed to help you to easily create, display and manage the events organized within your website. It doesn’t matter whether you have only one event or multiple events per day you can inform your readers about them in the most relevant way. Its high responsiveness provides positive user experience to your visitors as they can view the events from almost any kind of device.
You have four views at your disposal for displaying the events- Month, Week, List, Day. It enables you to create unlimited number of events, attach categories to events and add event tags. Your visitors have the possibility to search for events and inform others about events by sharing them on social media. You can provide venues for each event and mark them up on the map using Google maps integration feature. Be sure your guests are not going to miss it! Additionally, the event organizer gets the chance to be mentioned in the organizers section. It’s SEO friendly and provides structured event markup.
Photo Gallery
As a blogger I know that online users like images very much. So do me! Images are the front door to your content and greatly help you to provide a better viewing experience for your visitors. This aspect of images cannot be overlooked. Photo Gallery is an advanced fully responsive plugin which enables you to add and edit image galleries and multiple widgets for your posts and pages. You can add tags to all the images at once, provide detailed descriptions and organize them in different albums.
Within Photo Gallery plugin you have various views to display your galleries such as Thumbnails gallery view, Slideshow, Compact Album view, Extended Album view and Image Browser for single image display. The views are totally customizable. You can upload, rename, remove and copy images or image directories in just a few minutes. The number of galleries and albums you can create is unlimited and it supports JPG, JPEG, PNG and GIF image formats. There is a watermarking and advertisement possibility for individual images and an option to embed videos from YouTube and Vimeo within galleries. You can upload images from your website’s Media gallery and select who can edit the albums and galleries. WordPress Search integration will enable your website visitors search for images by gallery and album title. You can resize the images after adding them to the gallery or album and choose to display the number of images in the lightbox if you want. Image galleries can be added as widgets on a sidebar. These are not the complete list of the features Photo Gallery plugin offers. You’ll discover many other great features if you give it a try.
Better serving your website visitors and readers is the pathway to a better user experience on your website. If you value the role of the user experience and you seek to create great practices for the people visiting your website then these three plugins are a great choice for you. They are fully responsive, user friendly and just super easy to setup and use. Give them a try and see the surprising results they bring to your website.
Author : Gayane Mar
Bio: Gayane Mar is a passionate web-blogger who started her blogging activity a few years ago. Her posts are all about web design and web development. She writes all these posts for good people who need some guidance or advice with web development. The driving force behind her writings is the great hope that her blog posts would be helpful for each and every one reading them.
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