Posted March 8th, 2008 by Nancy
How fast are you with the mouse, just visit some sites that embed music or auto-playing video and you will find out, as you rapidly click around trying to turn off the sound!
It is best when you use video or sound files to be courteous and to allow users to turn it off, turn it down, or even replay it. This is one reason why I do not like embedded background music that has no user controls. Typically a site that plays music onLoad is found to be annoying by most users. Sometimes it is an issue that the reader has their own music on, that they don’t like the music you have selected, that the music starts playing too loud, or even as they really review your site the music plays over and over forcing them to manually turn the sound off. Here’s one for you to check out that is a good example of why you should not have music embedded. It can be fatiguing to listen to the same clip over and over.
My tip for best practice is don’t embed background music in your website! If you do add sound files or videos be courteous and provide playback controls. Make sure to have the play, pause, and repeat buttons and consider not playing the video or sound on page load.
Posted March 5th, 2008 by Nancy
Several months ago you saw all over the Web that animated characters were the rage. Supposedly, according to the animated site owners, animated characters were said to increase sales. Here’s an example www.SitePal.com.
Personally I found these characters which typically start talking right when the page loads annoying and I simply cannot react quickly enough to turn them off. They appear cartoonish and do not give the professional polished look that I think is best for professional websites.
Video is the rage now and there are options if you want to include interaction on your page, but stay away from animated characters unless you are catering to a younger set that may consider avatars such as these animated talking heads cool.
Posted February 5th, 2008 by Nancy
Nancy’s post for today is found at Blog-World Watch and is on the topic of using multimedia on your website and using blogs to draw readers into conversation.
You can visit the post on Earth-Ship.org now.
Posted February 5th, 2008 by Nancy
Nancy’s post for today is at Blog-World Watch and is on the topic of the creative use of multimedia on web pages and how a blog can draw readers into your conversation.
Posted February 2nd, 2008 by Nancy
With Universal Search being delivered web wide, you really should consider as part of your marketing plan to add video to your website in the near future.
I like video for clients as when the video is loaded onto Google Video as well as shown on the site, the video can actually appear as a link above the organic search results showing text listings.
My tip is to create video for your own website use, but also make a copy for Google Video and YouTube at the same time and then load all of them. Not only will your site be more interactive, but you may find your video getting top billing in organic results effectively driving traffic to your website.
One quick note, when you load your video to Google Video make sure to write a keyword dense description and use keywords in your movie file name as this will assist with placement.
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