Dec
3
Written by:
Project Complete
12/3/2009 4:16 PM
Do You Hear What I Hear is the title of a Christmas carol, but also seems appropriate as it pertains to a recent discussion we had regarding sound on websites. We were in the process of remodeling Project Complete's website, and found some really cool, what-we-thought-was-appropriate music to play a soothing tune while our web visitors browsed our site. Then I read a timely comment from one of our Twitter followers, who proclaimed that there is very rarely any reason to have music on a website, unless your point is to anger (he used a different word, but I'll keep it clean here) your visitors. We joked about how he must be one of those geeky types, who doesn't feel graphics are appropriate for websites, and the only thing he'd want to see on a website is HTML code. But then we thought again....
What if there really is a large faction of people who don't want music playing (even really cool, soothing music) when they land on a website? We certainly didn't want to be the type of web developers who would offend anyone, so we did a brief, unscientific poll — on Facebook, of course. Lo and behold, and much to our surprise, the response was overwhelmingly: NO MUSIC. Period. Okay, semicolon. Music would be okay if we made it optional and it didn't come on automatically. They made some good points we hadn't thought of before, like a person may be working and didn't want the sound to come on when the boss could be looking over their shoulder (or listening from the next cubicle). Another thing they made us aware of is that some people choose to have their own background music on when they're at the computer, so conflicting sounds would be a major distraction.
So, never let it be said that we don't listen to our audience. We made the sound optional only for our home page and our showcase page, so if you want a little music while you browse our site, it's there for you, but we'll respect the fact that not everyone hears what we hear.