Yesterday I was doing some research on auto related websites for a client and ran across a respectable looking ecommerce site that I swear I will never purchase from. The reason? They weren’t respectable sounding!
If you are a myspace junkie (my condolences) and you want to put your favorite song playing on your page – go for it. If I’m on myspace I expect tackiness. I expect to see text I can’t read because of obnoxious background images, a fair number of actress wannabes showing off their bodies in bikini photos, and to have to turn off music that I may not like.
If you are a band and you want to have your hit song start the moment I show up on your website – go for it. People visiting a band fan site are likely to enjoy the music and not be put off by it. Besides, band websites are more about style than substance anyway.
But if you are an ecommerce or informational website and you have sound automatically play when a visitor reaches your site – you deserve to quickly lose a percentage of your traffic as you are most certainly doing. The auto ecommerce site I mentioned earlier is a perfect example. I like cars, I buy car products, I buy things online but I won’t go back to that specific site to purchase anything because I was so annoyed at having squealing tire sounds pushed over my computer speakers. Worse, once the “car” was done squealing it’s tires the sound didn’t go away it just changed. I then found myself listening to the idling of a big bore muscle car. Don’t get me wrong, I like the sound of a well tuned engine as much as the next guy but I don’t want someone else deciding that I will listen to it until I can find the site button to turn off the sound. (In this case down below the fold in the bottom right hand quarter.)
When you decide to put sound on your website that plays automatically for all visitors what you are doing is deciding that all of your visitors have the same taste in music, will enjoy the same soundbyte, are essentially the same person. That may work in certain niche topics but if you are an ecommerce site you probably want to attract (and hold onto) as wide a group of visitors as you can.
Here are just a few examples of why I as a visitor may not like how you chose to welcome me with sound.
- It startled me because I wasn’t expecting it.
- It interfered with the music that I chose to listen to at that moment.
- It woke up my sleeping baby that I was holding and had just gotten to sleep.
- My dog woke up and starting barking which annoys my neighbors.
- I’m not supposed to be on the computer and because of the unexpected sound my mom/wife/kids caught me.
The list could go on and on. The simple point is that making sound, video, etc… available on your website is great. It allows your visitors to interact with your site in a new way and many will be grateful. But, let your visitor choose that experience rather than forcing it on them. The visitor you save might just become your next customer.
Comments on this entry are closed.