|
| One Hour HTML -
Learn the language of the web in just 60 minutes. |
Putting Multimedia to Good Use
by Anthony Stai
Multimedia on the web is often seen as a bad idea: it breaks the flow
of textual information, makes your bandwidth costs spiral out of
control, and annoys visitors who aren't expecting it. Used properly,
though, multimedia can enhance your website to no end, putting you
light-years ahead of your competitors.
The Principle of Least Surprise.
The most important thing to remember with multimedia is this: never,
ever include multimedia in a page unexpectedly. You think it'd be neat
to put a video of yourself greeting your customers on your homepage?
Maybe some background music for your product catalogue? For the love of
God, don't. There are few worse things on the web than going to a
website and having it try to throw unwanted multimedia at you.
The time to give your visitors multimedia content is when they have
absolutely explicity asked for it. You should link to it with text like
'watch the video' or 'listen now', and leave it up to them what they
want to do. Note that this also gives you a useful chance to ask the
visitor which media player they'd prefer, instead of just trying to
play things with one they might not have.
Audio on the Web.
Having been stung one too many times, there are a lot of users who only
browse the web with their speakers turned off. For this reason, you
need to give them something clearly useful to make it worth their while
to turn them back on, and you need to warn them in advance that they
will need to.
Once you've done that, what kind of content should you provide? Unless
you're a radio station or you're providing an audio feed of something
else that's happening live, streaming audio is generally a bad idea.
You should also note that there is no royalty structure in place for
web use of commercial music, so you can't really offer anything in that
way either.
Instead, you should look at offering downloads of spoken-word mp3
files, divided into 'episodes' of about ten minutes or so in length.
What you want to offer is entirely up to you: you could record some
motivational speeches, or read the Bible, or whatever, if you think
your visitors would appreciate it. The only rule is to keep it relevant
and keep it useful – no-one wants to download and listen to plain
old ads.
It's worth noting that web audio is undergoing a bit of a renaissance
right now as a result of the iPod and so-called 'podcasting'. This is
the practice of making short spoken audio segments available in a way
that makes them easy to download to an iPod (or other portable music
device) and listen to on-the-go. This is a practice that grows every
day, and is well worth getting into.
Video on the Web.
What can you use video for on the web? Well, if you have a product you
want to demonstrate, you could record it in action and offer that video
for download. Generally, though, web video tends to be restricted to
news and e-learning. In a commercial context, this means 'webinars'
– videos that offer the web equivalent of a seminar presentation,
made available for download.
When you make video for the web, though, you have some technical things
to worry about. You should really make any video content available in
three formats: Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime. Video
authoring tools will save in all three formats, but it can often be
complicated to write scripts that let users choose between these
players and load them: you need to consider this when you design the
website.
If push comes to shove, you need to be prepared for a segment of your
audience to be just plain unable to view your video content, no matter
how hard you try. For this reason, I would recommend that you make a
text version of anything you say in a video available as a 'can't see
this?' link, after you've offered some troubleshooting advice for
common video problems. You might also consider taking screenshots of
the video and making them available as static images, so that people
who can't see the video aren't just forced to read a huge chunk of
text.
About
The Author:
Anthony Stai invites you to
take your
website to the next level. Get one of the best Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) books on the market for Free! Learn the techniques
that differentiate the amateurs from the pros. Get your book at http://www.makemoneyonline4you.com/seo.html
|
|
|
|
Web Information
Online