Putting Multimedia to Good Use
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.