Question

If you look at my URL below, and on a connection that may not be really speedy. You’d notice the slider at the top, loads each individual slide in a vertical list (Taking about 1000px space) before snapping into the way it’s supposed to render – which is like a standard slider; displaying and sliding one slide at a time.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to allow my slider to load correctly?

Live site at >> http://tinyurl.com/cz6sawg

— Thanks for any pointers, I’m thinking I need to find a script that allows the slides to be hidden until the slider / page is fully loaded before presenting them.

Relevant jQuery:

<script type="text/javascript">

jQuery(document).ready(function($){
    $("#photo-rotator").tabs({fx:{opacity: "toggle"}}).tabs("rotate", 6000);
});

</script>

Relevant Mark-Up:

<!-- Top of Page Slider FRAGILE -->

<div style="min-height: 280px;">

<div id="photo-rotator" style="">
<?php $slide_id=1; ?>
<?php
 $featuredPosts = new WP_Query();
 $featuredPosts->query("showposts=3");
 while ($featuredPosts->have_posts()) : $featuredPosts->the_post();
 ?>

    <div id="slide-<?php echo $slide_id; $slide_id++;?>">
     <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" class="post-image">
         <?php the_post_thumbnail( 'rotator-post-image' ); ?>
         <span class="title" style="font-style:italic; color:#999;"><?php the_title(); ?></span>
     </a>
     </div>

    <?php endwhile; ?><!--/close loop-->

    <ul id="slide-nav">
        <?php $nav_id=1; ?>
        <?php while ($featuredPosts->have_posts()) : $featuredPosts->the_post(); ?>
            <li>
                <a href="#slide-<?php echo $nav_id; ?>">
                    <span class="thumbnail" style="display:none;">
                    </span>
                    <p style="color:#F93; font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;"><? the_title(); $nav_id++;?></p>

                    <div style="">

                    <!--<?php the_excerpt(); ?>-->

                    <?php if($text= get_post_meta($post->ID, "slidetext", true)) { ?>
                         <div class="">

                         <p style="font-weight: normal; color: #333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><?php echo $text; ?></p> 

                         </div>
                        <?php } //else { print"<div>"; } ?>  

                    </div>   

                </a>
            </li>
        <?php endwhile; ?><!--/close loop-->
        </ul>
        </div>

</div>        

<!-- End Top page Slider FRAGILE -->

Answer 1

Your code is a bit messy, and the question does not help, but in relation to the part of your question where it reads:

ou’d notice the slider at the top, loads each individual slide in a vertical list (Taking about 1000px space) before snapping into the way it’s supposed to render

You can wrap the entire slider content with a div and give overflow:hidden; to prevent the height of +/-1000px on the page load:

CSS

#photo-rotatorWrapper {
    width: 960px;
    height: 400px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    overflow: hidden;
}

HTML

<div id="photo-rotatorWrapper">
  <div id="photo-rotator">
    ...
  </div>
</div>

Note:
You may need to set other CSS declarations for that wrapper in order to stay positioned correctly within your current HTML structure.