Sound can be used in a several ways on your website. Firstly it can be used as background music so when the page loads a theme will play automatically. This can be useful if you have a theme or jingle instantly recognisable or synonymous with your company, think Coronation Street.
Secondly and probably the most popular use of sound on a website is using sound bites. A Sound bite is normally a small piece of sound which is attached to a player or button so when the user clicks it the sound bite plays. This is used mostly on sites such as www.amazon.com and www.hmv.co.uk were the user can actually listen to clips of tracks before they buy them.
Although not as common in use sound can also be used as a navigation tool within your website. By including a tiny sound clip behind your sites navigational links or buttons it will confirm to the user that a link has been clicked reassuring them.
Posted on January 31st, 2008 by Alex in
Design A Great way to boost user interactivity and to enhance your website is by including video. People say pictures tell a thousand words; well if that is the case then a thousand moving pictures tell a million words.
An embedded video can be a great way to advertise a product, or to get a message across to the viewer without them having to scroll through pages of text. Sound and moving objects will attract the user’s attention and keep them interested and entertained, especially if they been trawling the internet for hours looking at nothing but text over the last several sites.
Using video is becoming increasingly popular throughout the internet with big corporate companies such as Audi, Nike, Adidas and Levi’s all using video on their home pages. The effect is stunning integrating the video with the rest of the page gives the site a whole new dynamic and certainly separates them from their competitors.
The examples above use video in a very bold way to advertise a product, but video can be used more subtly just to enhance the look of your site. This can be done by using a Flash animated banner or company logo. Animating these elements should make them stick in the viewers mind.
Just before you start thinking that you want a completely animated site with all the bells and whistles, be warned there are a couple potential problems. Video and animation are not entirely browser friendly and additional software called plug-ins must be installed before the browser can display the video. You could potentially loose a huge chunk of your target audience by including too much video and animation for this reason.
My tip with video and animation is that less is more. Don’t saturate your site with them as that will increase page load times and deter potential viewers. Use it subtly and integrate it with the rest of the site to create an improved user experience.
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