Many of us "live" on the internet. Whether we are online to check a email or to connect on social media, we live in world that is dependent on the internet. As we search thousands of websites for information, at some point in time we come across some that are not maintained and others that are flat out dull. Who wants to visit websites with only text? Seems a little primitive with all of the perks that you can now add to a website. If you own or maintain a website, it is imperative that you add some form of multimedia to your website. Multimedia includes a combination of text, audio, still images, animation, or video. Adding some form of multimedia will add a little "flair" to any website.
How does multimedia enhance our messaging?
Some of my favorite sites to visit on the web are vacation websites, especially islands. I want to know what the beach looks like and I want to know what my hotel offers. The more pictures the site has the better. Lately, I have been checking the web for great deals to Turks and Caicos. Travelocity is a great place to start. They are a travel website that generally offers great deals on vacation destinations. If you visit their website, you can do searches on hotels, cruises and entire vacation packages. That's great and all to have access to that type of information, but what if it was just that, information. What if that website had nothing but text, no images, no videos, no nothing. It would be pretty awful to look at. Even if did use colorful wording, the site would still be boring. Yes we process words, but we are also visual. We need visuals to drive home the point and get the senses going. Who would want to buy a hotel room without seeing what it looked like? Would you want to stay in room that looked like this?
I know that I wouldn't. But if you go to Travelocity.com, you get great visual images like this:
| Image B |
| Image C |
This is what multimedia does for a website. The messaging is more effective because you have added visuals. The viewer becomes more enticed because seeing images is much more effective than reading about them. You easily say something wonderful about image A especially if don't post pictures. On the other hand, if you truly care about your business and image, you know that effective messaging works best with images such as B and C. It just makes more sense.
Are certain multimedia techniques more effective than others?
Well, that depends on the type of website that you own or maintain. I would say that if you are a news organization such as CNN or MSNBC, then you would want to not only have a news story, but be able to provide images or a video to make the message more effective. Take this video from CNN.com for example:
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/10/31/nr-bpr-miles-obrien-virgin-galactic-spaceshiptwo.cnn.html
This is a video of the crash seen involving Space Ship Two. In this case, having a website with just text could work because you are providing news details about an important story. You may not have visuals at the time, but you at least have some facts to put a story together. Once you get images or video footage, these multimedia tools are very effective because you have now added visual imagery to enhance the story. Readers can not only read the story but they can see the story. Images make the message more effective.
Overall, multimedia has great advantages depending on the message that you which to convey. Because we visual, it is definitely important to add images to enhance a website. This would absolutely get the message across. You can't smell things on a website, but you can see them.
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