I Don’t Want No Audio

Having consulted with a number of clients over the past three years, one of the biggest battles I have had to handle is the ‘I want to auto play music on my page’ syndrome.

You would expect creatives and artists to want this, but I have had to convince even boring business men to restrain from this mistake.

People hate not being in control, imagine a user checking out your website from work and suddenly music blares out from the computer which makes everybody including the boss take notice of the user’s extra curricular activities. Think it is funny? I am sure your user wont appreciate that.

If you really want to have music, it will be wise to do the following.

  • DO NOT auto play, give the user an option to switch on the noise.
  • DO NOT host the audio on your server, use a CDN (Content Delivery Network). You do want people to be able to load your website right? Plus it is cheaper to stream data via a CDN.
  • Please provide a volume control, don’t make the user frantically try to adjust volume, make it easy.

Remember, flashy blingy websites are cool. But there is a fine line between cool and irritating.

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Published: Monday, June 14th, 2010
Filed under: Thoughts & Brain-Farts
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