DECIDE WHEN TO USE MULTIMEDIA

Used correctly, audio and video can be effective tools for getting your message across on the Web. Used poorly, audio and video can actually drive visitors away and make people not want to return to your Web site. You're much less likely to make a disastrous mistake if you keep the following three things in mind:

  • Your Web site's purpose (remember your mission statement from the first lesson?)
  • Your audience
  • The limitations of the Web

For example, if you're a real estate agent, the purpose of your site might be to sell homes. To sell homes, you need people to visit your site, see listings, and become interested enough in a particular listing to contact you. To achieve this goal, you might decide that video clips of houses would be helpful.

As mentioned in previous lessons, you need to be aware of how fast an Internet connection your visitors are likely to have. In the case of a general-interest site, you have to assume the worst. Although about 50 million homes and businesses in the United States have broadband Internet access, it's still generally considered safe to design general-interest sites for a 56 Kbps (kilobits per second) modem.

In general, the broader your audience is, the more careful you need to be with using multimedia. On the other hand, if you have a limited and homogenous group of people accessing your site (as in the case of a company's internal Web site, or intranet), and if you know the speeds of their connections to the site are not a factor, you can make more liberal use of multimedia.

Think carefully about your target audience and how they access the Internet before adding multimedia to your Web site. A lot of companies currently track this subject, so google broadband internet usage statistics to find the latest information on broadband usage rates. You can even type in your state, region, or target audience (such as home buyers) to find targeted information about usage rates. In the next section, you'll learn how to add audio to your site.