I am required to use carousels very often in our designs - sometimes as many as 4 separate carousels on a homepage.
To increase engagement & conversions with website visitors (and of course reduce annoyance), I have tried to come up with an alternative to a carousel which I hope will negate some of the bad experiences that users have with them. Basically, I ended up with an accordion.
Here is a quick wireframe of the concept:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
I feel this is the right way to go in most cases, however it seems to me that most websites are trending away from accordions, and that while carousels may be more common, they are also in decline. (this is based on my own experience only).
So, I wanted to know if there was a good reason for this apparent decline, before deciding what to recommend.
Are there disadvantages to using an accordion like this, to display featured items, rather than a carousel?
Edit - the content of these features would be an image, title and possibly and excerpt, which would link to another page on the same site. For the purposes of this question you can assume they won't be promotions or link to an external site or service.