Review of CodeCanyon’s Slider Maker

CodeCanyon’s Slider Maker claims to be the best plugin out there in creating animated sliders. And when you look at their website and video demo, it’s easy to see why they would make that claim. Built with HTML5, CSS and Javascript, it’s pretty awesome having the ability to create animated sliders and be able to post it anywhere within your website.

Let’s take a closer look at Slider Maker to see if it can really live up to its claim.

The fact that it’s standalone slider builder gives it a huge advantage. You don’t need any coding skills and it can easily be integrated into any site administration dashboard, which can be useful for agencies and freelancers who want to give free hands to their clients to build their sliders or galleries. Upload Slider Maker on your PHP server and you’re done. No database, and no install process. They have an easy to use interface and tutorial videos and guides to help anyone get started on their own. You mainly drag and drop, copy and paste the components and animated layers so you start creating your slider in under an hour. It’s also helpful that they have a bunch of ready-made templates for different industries, pre-built CSS themes, transitions effects, and a library of images and icons. The text layers are Google Fonts powered and uses CSS3 word/lettering animations. The timelines comes with full real-time animation control which allows you to position elements, pick colors, resize fonts, dropshadows with drag and drop.

The Slider Maker also provides a lot of built in options. User interface and text supports multiple languages. There’s also autoplay and pause options within the slider. You can also add links, choose to display or not thumbnails, legends, captions, navigation. The sliders are loaded using AJAX which means it doesn’t slow the page down when loading. Code has been carefully optimized for fast loading and very light footprint (98/100 rating on Google page speed test).

Slider Maker also has a live preview feature, so you can see how your slider looks even before you publish it. It’s also SEO friendly which can help with your website’s SERP.

But what makes the Slider Maker more powerful compared to slider builders our there is the fact that the sliders themselves are fully responsive, retina ready, and can be adapted to any device. It’s touch responsive, it auto-adapts to any sized device, it load really well and looks really good.

Unfortunately, these sliders don’t support sound. But the developers have responded to this in the comments on their website, saying that they plan to introduce this feature soon.

But the biggest beef I have with this plugin is that it doesn’t have an extended product license. The $15 regular license only comes with 6 months support. You have to pay an extra $4.50 if you want that extended to 12 months. If you have another website, you’ll have to shell out another $15 to $20 for that as well.

But shelling out for 6 months (or 12 months) of support is worth it because the support there is really responsive and goes out of their way to help as much as possible, from correcting user codes to setting up servers. And all updates are free so you only have to pay once per project.

If you’re not confident about your coding or animation skills, CodeCanyon’s Slider Maker would be a great deal. And it’s a great thing that they started releasing updates again, getting rid of the eventual bugs and adding more themes, new features and templates. If you can afford to pay $15 per website (which includes 6 months individual support, lifetime updates and guaranteed no bugs) and you’re getting a lot of value from your sliders, then Slider Maker would be a worthwhile investment.