Designing sliders in web sites

I have been upgrading my business web site recently, and it now includes a slider with continuously scrolling images. All of these were created in PowerPoint. I am new to the world of web design but sense an interesting trend where corporate web sites go from complex to simple, only communicating the key messages about a company.

My site is still far from perfect (slides are too busy, slider goes too fast) and I plan to improve slowly (when I have the combination of inspiration and time).

Here are some things that I think are important when designing these sliders:

• Avoid plastic/cheesy/standard stock images
• Pick images with lots of white space
• Make sure the color of the images sort of match the color scheme of the site
• Put text elements at exactly the same spot on each slide to avoiding jumping titles
• Align items in your image with the grid of the web site design
• Take over as many features from the automated web site template as you can. I am still constrained by my web template (fonts, positioning of headlines etc.). Some low-level HTML editing and conversations with the template designer made things a lot better though.
• Use a smooth slide transition, avoid aggressive animations and the worst: the fast rewind at the end of the last slide

Let me know if you have more thoughts on this. I am learning.