Ever wanted to add a slide show to your site, but lacked the know how or time and didn’t want to purchase specialized software? Well, RockYou is a pretty cool hosted solution that enables you to create a Flash-based web slide show in just minutes.
Easy Slideshow Creation
All you have to do to create your slideshow is add your images (they are hosted by ImageShack) and optional captions and add the code they provide you to your page. Simple!
Customization Options
It’s easy to change the order of slides and to add and delete them. Rock You also provides a limited number of customization options – font size and color and transition type. However, it would be great to have more options.
RockYou do say on their home page that they will be introducing more themes, formatted captions, and “awesome animated shoutouts” whatever that is.
Can you tell that they are targeting the MySpace/younger crowd? However, if they keep inmproving the ways you can customize your slide show, then this could be a very nice service indeed.
I’d love to see a paid version which provides you with more features and the ability to remove their logo from the slideshow.
For example, it would be useful to have some player controls and to be able to choose whether the slideshow loops and starts immediately.
Online Slideshow Alternatives
slideroll is a similar solution that does offer a paid, ad-free version. I haven’t tried it, but it looks very full-featured.
Slide provides a slightly different way to present your images, but looks interesting.
If you’re looking for something more sophisticated that you can install on your server, then you can’t go wrong with SimpleViewer – a fantastic but easy to set up Flash slideshow solution.
If you’re looking for the ultimate slideshow creator, then you should check out SlideShowPro. However, you need to have Flash installed to use it and you need to have a reasonable level of web design experience.
It’s a great tool, though, and is a good deal at $20.
Sometimes it is easier to purchase ready-made presentation created in Macromedia Flash than wasting time and create nothing.