Navigation for slide shows

Need ideas & examples

[Wilma]

I'm building environmental literacy slide shows. Users will drop in via deep links from SEs. If they like what they see after clicking thru a few slides, they may want to go back to the beginning and see the whole show.

I'd like to give them some visual indication of what they've seen and what they haven't (in case they want to skip what they've seen when they go back thru). I also want to preserve a clean, uncluttered look, minimizing their mental overhead.

A row of little graphic rectangles with the current page's rectangle a brighter color could tell visitors "you are here", but wouldn't indicate what they've seen and what they haven't. Text links can give this information via color changes, but slide numbers and plusses look too cluttered, while bullets are too small to see colors easily. Macs have suitable dingbat characters, but I bet they're not compatible across platforms. 8-/

Any other ideas?

Simply seeing a variety of slide show designs would give me ideas about what to try and avoid. Please sticky me with URLs.

Thanks for the help and the warm welcome, everybody. 8-)

[Birdman]

How about having a separate border color for "visited" pics.

You can do this easily with the visited link state.

[Nick_W]

I like simple text links:

First ¦ Prev ¦ Next ¦ Last

Possibly incorporating Birdmans border colors if these are done with thumbnails also?

Nick

[Wilma]

Great idea, Birdman! With nice, fat borders the actual graphic could be miniscule. I'll try it.

Normally, I'm a text link fanatic. My whole site is built with text links -- the site logo is about the only exception. But for slide shows, forward and back arrows actually seem to work better, perhaps because the mental overhead is so minimal when choices are limited.