Web Design: Adding Sound to your Web Site - the good, the bad and the ugly

Adding Sound to your Web Site - the good, the bad and the ugly

Written by Alan Steward

Adding Sound to your Web Site - repparttar

good,

bad and

ugly

Many webmasters like repparttar 132601 idea of adding background music to their web sites but most shy away from doing it worrying about slow loading pages and large file sizes. There are many different ways to add background music to your site and some of them don't require large files to achieve professional results. Let's examine all repparttar 132602 different ways to add background music to your site and rate them to find repparttar 132603 best solution for you.

1) MIDI Files MIDI files are very small because they actually use your sound card's built-in instruments to create repparttar 132604 sounds. The problem is that most sound cards don't have any decent sounds to start with, plus no two sound cards sound alike and therefore repparttar 132605 results are very unpredictable. MIDI files usually sound like they're coming from one of those cheap Casio keyboards. Using MIDI for background music is very likely to make your site seem amateurish. Want to know how to do it anyway? Just add repparttar 132606 line to your site. (Replace xyz with repparttar 132607 name of repparttar 132608 MIDI file you want to use!) The Autostart command will play repparttar 132609 file automatically when repparttar 132610 page is loaded. PROS; Very small file size, easy to implement CONS: Unpredictable results, amateurish sounds

2) WAV Files Using repparttar 132611 WAV file format allows you to add professional sounding recordings to your site but repparttar 132612 problem is that even if you use a low quality setting like 11k/8bit, repparttar 132613 file sizes are still very large and it will take a long time for your music to load. And slow loading pages are repparttar 132614 worst thing that can happen to a site. Implementing a WAV file on a web page is easy. Just add repparttar 132615 line to your page's HTML code. There's an additional command to loop repparttar 132616 WAV file but WAV files do not loop cleanly with repparttar 132617 embed command. PROS: Many Quality Levels, Easy to implement CONS: Large File Sizes, WAV Files do not loop

3) MP3 Files MP3 files are highly compressed and don't take that long to load but repparttar 132618 problem is that MP3s need to bring up an external player program and which in some cases takes your visitors away from your site altogether. Also, MP3 files don't loop cleanly. PROS: Smaller File Sizes, Good Quality Possible CONS: Needs external player software, not loopable

Text Is King!

Written by James C. Micucci

Are you building your website? If so, STOP! Take a look at what you have done so far. How many images do you have? How much text do you have?

If your website has more images than text then you could be in trouble. Ask yourself these two questions

What are my visitors at my website for?

Chances are, your visitors cam to your website to find information on a topic or to answer a question. They probably didn’t come to look at pictures (unless you run a photo gallery). Give your visitors what they want and they will keep on coming back.

Why did I put all these images on my website.

Now, this is not always true, but what I have found is that people put a lot of images on their website to make up for poor quality content. They think if they have a pretty looking website, people won’t pay that much attention to repparttar text. That is another wrong assumption that should never be made.

Cont'd on page 2 ==>