Animated and multimedia content

You can provide a more attractive visual experience for users, and keep their attention, by including animated and multimedia content on your site.

Animation

Animated content is presented in a short, visual sequence that usually plays automatically. This can include words or images that appear and move across the screen in a predetermined fashion when a user opens a page on your website. Options for tools to create animated content include:

• Adobe’s Flash product.
• Microsoft’s SilverLight
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
• a feature—called “canvas”—in the HTML5 coding standard.

Both Flash and Silverlight are proprietary systems, while SVG and HTML5 are open standards.

Flash is currently one of the most commonly used tools but has the limitation that it is not supported on many mobile devices, including the iPhone.

For visitors to view a Flash, SilverLight or other animation format on your website they are usually required to have the appropriate plug-in installed in their web browser.

It is usually best to use popular plug-ins on your website, and also to make any content that requires a plug-in available in other formats where possible. For example, if you have a Flash animation on your website, you could also offer an alternative animation format or a text description of it for people who do not have the appropriate plug-in and cannot install it on their mobile device.

Software required to create animations is usually quite expensive, and the ability to use these packages to best effect usually requires a reasonable level of skill, training and experience. Many local and regional institutes of technology or private training organisations run short courses on web application software and animation tools. Alternatively, your web designer can point you in the right direction to seek expert help in this area.

Like image files, search engines cannot index the content in Flash or other animations. When using Flash it is important to include tags in the form of metadata that describe the file so that search engines will pick it up. See tagging and metadata for more information.

Since animation files are often large, they can take some time to download and so create delays in viewing or navigating your website. For this reason you may choose to avoid or limit the use of these tools because they can adversely affect the user experience.

Audio and video

Video differs from animation because it is usually a recording of a real-life event, often recorded from a video capture device (such as a video camera). This visitor initiates the viewing (usually, by pressing a “play” or “►” button to start the video). Depending on the video format you choose, some users may need to download a plug-in before viewing it.

Common video players include:

• Adobe’s Flash Player
• Microsoft’s Windows Media Player
• Apple Quicktime
• Real Player
• DivX
• VLC, which is an open source alternative.

Audio files are usually presented in a similar way to video files and using the same media players.

Files with video content are often extremely large. You will usually need to make a compromise between the size at which the video is displayed (its resolution) and the time it will take to download. The duration of the clip is also a factor in file size.

Another option is to embed a video player on your web page but upload the video content to a video hosting service. Current popular video sharing websites include:

• YouTube—a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share and view videos
• Vimeo—a video-centric social networking website that supports embedding, sharing, video storage and user-commenting on each video page.
• Google Videos—a free video sharing website and video search engine.

The sites listed above allow viewers to embed links to videos within their own websites if the provider of the video enables that option in their account settings. This is a great way of expanding your audience, but you must realise that you cannot control the context in which your video appears on someone else’s site.

There are companies that will host your video or image content for a fee, and offer more control over how you present your material, but the costs may exceed the benefit.

See audio and video sharing for more information.