Your website is your company’s face to the world, revealing who you are and what you offer. Properly designed, it’s both your greatest repository of published information and your 30 second elevator speech.
One of the greatest challenges of any website is how to quickly deliver an accurate, unique first impression of what your company does and how it can uniquely benefit visitors. The problem that every set of web statistics I have seen consistently shows is that a high percentage of visitors (normally more than 50%) are on your site for less than 30 seconds and never navigate beyond the home page. The result is a need to deliver information on the home page quickly and accurately, and give visitors a reason to explore the site more.
Multimedia Speeds Up Communication
Use of interactive multimedia components is one way to engage visitors with your primary message, capture interest and create higher levels of communication effectiveness. A number of different types of multimedia components based on Flash and/or JavaScript technology are emerging, and are normally embedded into the home page as a focal point of the website presentation.
Here are a few popular options. Click on the image to view the live example in a new browser tab.
SlideDeck
SlideDeck provides an intuitive framework for sharing ideas or explaining how something works. It's one example of powerful jQuery slider components that also work well on smartphones and tablet PCs.
Carousel: Product Tour
A Carousel provides an excellent tool for presenting visuals along with captions to tell a story or introduce products. Users can control the display of images, and the component can also contain embedded video.
Sliding Video Player
This Video Player provides sliding navigation that makes viewing videos easy for site visitors. The implementation is mobile-friendly, falling back to single images on mobile devices.
Photo Albums & Galleries
Photo Albums & Galleries provide an elegant interface to display, in this case, photo galleries by product category with captions to help carry the storyline. The particular component combines Flash with a server software solution that makes it easy to manage photo albums on the website.
Why Interactive Multimedia Components Work
The reason why interactive multimedia is an effective option centers on its ability to communicate quickly and integrate use of interesting visuals. Website visitors, particularly when they are no deeper than the home page, are browsing rather than reading. The combination of visuals, audio and video increases the speed of communication. It succeeds because multimedia components naturally invite visitors to explore and take simple actions to gain more information. The user can more easily control playback, skip ahead, select which the parts of the message that are most appealing and move on if they aren’t interested.
Multimedia components focus the message communicated by the site and highlight key sections such as “push” products or technology. Often, a multimedia component becomes a kind of secondary navigation that introduces features of the site, generating interest and linking to related content. This can be effectively used to guide specific targeted audience groups such as current customers, for example.
For those in marketing positions, multimedia cuts through the clutter of every day news and events to consistently deliver important higher level messages and truly reinforce the brand. We think of it as the 30 second elevator speech because it puts the focus on concisely delivering the brand in an entertaining, effective way that will resonate with prospects, customers and stakeholders.
