MULTIMEDIA DESIGN

PERHAPS THE MOST POWERFUL aspect of computing technology is the ability to combine text, graphics, sounds, and moving images in a meaningful ways. The promise of multimedia has been slow to reach the Web because of bandwidth limitations, but each day brings new solutions. Although there are numerous methods for creating Web multimedia, we recommend using stable technology that works for the great majority of client machines. Plug-ins that extends the capabilities of your Web pages is a mixed blessing. You risk losing your audience if you require them to jump through hoops to view your content.

Networked multimedia requires scaling and compression, which means that much of the content created for analog delivery does not work well on the Web. The key to successful Web multimedia is to tailor your content for Web delivery. Web designers must always be considerate of the consumer. A happy customer will come back, but one who has been made to wait and is then offered goods that are irrelevant is likely to shop elsewhere. Because multimedia comes with a high price tag, it should be used sparingly and judiciously. All too often Web authors include visual or moving elements on the page for the purpose of holding the user's attention. This approach is based on the assumption that Web users have short attention spans, which in many cases may be true. However, the solution is not to add gratuitous "eye candy" to your Web presentation, which may, in fact, command too much of the user's attention and detract attention from the main content of your page. When thinking about adding media to your Web pages, consider first and foremost the nature of your materials. Use images, animations, video, or sound only when relevant to your message.