SlideDeck 2 Lite–A beatiful Content Slider

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Since installing Studiopress’ Genesis Framework on Evolutionary Designs, I have been looking for the perfect theme to fit the site. Currently Evolutionary Designs is using a variation of the CopyBlogger theme until I can decided on the right them for the site. The one thing that I have always wanted was to to have an image/feature article slider. But with most sliders, I wasn’t happy with design or the way it looked on the site. After trying out a few plugins, I decided that I was going to have code my own slider.

Slide Deck 2 was one of my favorite premium sliders so I decided to try out SlideDeck 2 Lite (full but limited version) before purchasing the developer’s version.

SlideDeck 2 Lite Review

Just a few months ago released a free version of SlideDeck 2. Although not many have heard  much about this great plugin, there has been over over 50,000 downloads and received a 4.3 out of 5 stars from WordPress users.

SlideDeck 2 Lite Limitations

As I mentioned, SlideDeck 2 Lite is limited. Here is what you do get. If you want more, then you have to buy the full version of SlideDeck 2.

• Flickr
• YouTube
• Pinterest
• WordPress Posts
• Twitter
• max of 5 slides
• Only two of the Lenses (Toolkit & O-Town)
• SlideDeck 2 Lite is branded with a little “SD” logo on slider.
• Plugin isn’t supported. It will only be supported for major bug fixes.

My Thoughts on SlideDeck 2 Lite

I was originally introduced to SlideDeck 2 when I was looking for the perfect content slider. After looking at a few plugins, I was discouraged and went looking for the content slider code. So I could build the slider from the front end and not have to do both the back end coding and then work on a design that fit Evolutionary Designs. Sometime during my code search I stumbled on to SlideDeck 2 and was instantly in love with the design and the features available. But I wasn’t yet sold on the slider.

Although the developer’s version had everything I needed, I wasn’t sold on the price. Even though you can run a demo on their site, I wanted to get my hands on a full version or trial version on my test site or even my live site to see how well it worked, it loaded, and what I could do with it.

Then When the Lite version came out, I decided to give it try. What I found was it was simple to install and easy to setup new slides either by using your own WordPress content or from a limited selection of social media sites.

After playing with the settings and adjusting things, I came up with an image slider that I liked. At this point, I was happy. Then came the load tests.  If you been on site since adding the slider, then you know, there has been some loading issues.

I tried to tweak the settings, adjust the caching plugin on Evolutionary Designs, and did some image optimization. But I had no luck. The slider works great on individual pages and posts but on the main page its has an ugly load time.

What I found was the code needed to load after the rest of page loaded and this would solve the ugly load issues. So I tried a few tricks but with no luck, it still loads slowly.

Final Thoughts

So after giving this plugin some thought, I have decided to remove it. I may add this plugin to another site that the plugin might load faster on. But as for Evolutionary Designs, this plugin isn’t the one.

This is a great plugin, but as mentioned before, its not going to work for Evolutionary Designs. But this would be a great for sites that do not have that many images.

But if I could add any feature to this great plugin, it would be the option to make the code load last. At some point, I plan on doing a review of the premium version of SlideDeck 2.