Using multimedia site content: can make your website much more useful and much more attractive. When you decide to include multimedia content on your website, remember that you’re talking about a huge toolbox, which you can draw upon to alter the site experience for your visitors. Multimedia includes audio, video, animation, images and many other forms of web content. Using it effectively means using it intelligently. That’s because you can easily overload your site with multimedia without any benefit for the end user.
What Is It For?
The first thing you should ask yourself before you include a piece of multimedia content on your website is why you’re doing it. If you’re just putting it on the site for no particular reason at all, you may just want to leave it out. Any multimedia content you add to your site should enrich the user experience. Remember that enriching the user experience, however, may mean something as simple as providing content that’s entertaining.
Multimedia tends to catch people’s interest because it gives them something to do on websites other than read. The catch is that the multimedia has to be instantly compelling. If you look at most Internet videos, it becomes readily apparent that you can skip a good portion of them before you get to the point. Make sure your multimedia is crafted in a way that will instantly interest users.
Why Does it Work?
Good multimedia tends to capture user’s interests for many different reasons. One of the most significant reasons is because it’s easy to share. Consider how difficult it is to get somebody to read a book that you recommend as compared to how easy it is to get them to go see a movie that you recommend to them. A lot of multimedia can be consumed passively by the reader. In fact, multimedia content is oftentimes a welcome distraction in people’s e-mail inboxes during their workdays.
You’ve probably heard the term “viral” as a marketing strategy for multimedia content. The idea behind this is that you produce something so compelling or entertaining that people want to share it with others, thus creating what amounts to a free advertisement for your business. This is a good goal but remember that the Internet is full of entertaining content and that it might be more useful to create something that users will find informative and interesting than it is to create something that will take the Internet by storm.
Limit Usage
Unfortunately, adding multimedia content to a website is extremely easy and inexpensive – in most cases – but upgrading computers takes a considerable investment. If you add too much multimedia content to your website, it’s likely that many of your visitor’s computers are going to start slowing down when they’re trying to view your website. Overloading someone’s computer and thus slowing down your website is one of the easiest ways to persuade them to leave your website altogether. Think of multimedia content as something that you want to add in a very targeted way rather than something you want to add in a scattershot way. More is definitely not always better where multimedia content is concerned.
Variety
If you’re going to offer multimedia content, consider offering several different types. For example, a podcast is something that people can download and enjoy on their own time while an Internet video is something that they may have to be on the computer to enjoy. Offering different types of content allows you to reach out to your audience in a much broader way. Remember, even though television and movies have been around for a very long time, some people still do enjoy listening to radio shows a lot more and, thus, there’s always room for different types of multimedia when you’re marketing or just trying to entertain people.
Author’s Bio:
Matt Dandurand is the CEO of MediaContour.com, offering web design in Los Angeles, CA.
