Making a Website Into a Multimedia Experience

Choosing which types of multimedia to include in your website can be a tricky choice but it's really just a matter of digging down into what your customers expect to see as well as your desired or current position in the market.

Unfortunately the first question on many business owners lips is:

"What can we have?" or more worryingly "What can we spend our budget on?"

The correct question should be:

"What would help us compete" or "What would set us apart from the competition".

This comes down to innovation and preventing your business from becoming stale. So if your competitors have an all singing all dancing website with a HD video speaking about their products or services then does this mean that you should get it too. Not necessarily, it depends on whether this is working for them. This comes down to knowing your target market and realising what they really need to see to buy from you. This isn't easy but if you get you right you can improve your market share.

We've seen quite a few separate buzz websites where businesses have opted to have a main website and then one or more spin off website which promote separate products or advertise an event. There is an obvious tradeoff here. The website administrators will need to manage more than one website. But if a maintenance plan is in place this is always more manageable.

If you consider a website from a user's point of view and have a good understanding of the various persons who are likely to be using your website then you'll notice that different forms of media are useful for people who consume information differently and for different situations. For example, I like to listen to podcasts whilst driving, online video at night and read text in the morning. That's just me and there are more like me. The point is that if you offer all types of media on your website then you are likely to cater from most of your target market. But there is a cost. Your costs benefits analysis will tell you how far you should go with this and help to keep you out of the trap of too little or too much. Too little is when you stick to text and graphics. There is nothing wrong with this, most businesses do it, many successful businesses do it and you wil please Pareto by hitting 80% of your target market with 20% of the cost of a complete multimedia experience.

Too much is usually going the whole hog then finding out that your target market won't really use it or won't appreciate it. This is when you could have spent less and got very similar results. So the key to deciding to what extent to make your website a multimedia experience is in the research, copious amounts! As well as in the ongoing testing to make sure that your multimedia website is really doing it's job.