I may only be twenty but I still remember struggling to view
sites while on a dial up modem. Web pages took forever to load and I truly
hated sites that used fancy images and videos in place of content, sure they
looked pretty but it would take me five minutes just to load one page.
But that was then, the darker days of the internet, now with
broadband widely available and download speeds increasing exponentially there
is no reason not to get a little creative with your site. Nice clean hi-res
images will make you site look professional and sites like YouTube are more than
willing to host the video you want to place on your site. Now this is not to
say that you should stop using text for content, which would just kill your
search engine placement, instead use videos to augment the written content on
your page. There are some major sites that do this very well, one of them is Cnet. Cnet is a website devoted to reviews of
the latest technology gadgets and gear and for a long time these reviews and
articles were long pages of text with a few interspaced images. Now with
broadband being so available Cnet has begun to include video reviews alongside
their traditional reviews. The video reviews often paraphrase the written
review but tend to be far more engaging as the viewer can actually see the
gadget in question and watch as the reviewer walks them through the things they
liked or disliked about any particular device. An example of this would be the review on this
Nikon
Digital SLR, there at the top of the page is a video review of the product
and directly bellow it is the longer written review of the same product. Visitors
to this page can read the full review but the video version offers viewers a
chance to see exactly what the reviewer is talking about in a way text never
could.
One of ShopVisible’s newest sites Don L Leasing has begun to embed videos
directly on their homepage. Visitors have a chance to see some of their distinguished
clientele and to receive a guided tour around parts of Don L Leasing. The video
itself is hosted by YouTube and embedded into the Don L Leasing site, a simple
and easy process that will allow any site to have rich multimedia content.
Nowadays when I am curious about the latest bit of info on
some new tech product I don’t read the long two page article on the web,
instead I just watch the video which gives me a more visual understanding of
the product I am interested in. Watching the video is not really quicker than
reading the article, it’s just more entertaining and in today’s world of
YouTube and twenty second clips on CNN a short video can be an effective sales
tool.
Keep on rockin’
BC
