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Mark this as one of the website mistakes you don’t ever want to make on your art website. That mistake is autoplaying music or some other type of sound on your site. While this isn’t as rampant on the web as it used to be, the big exception seeming to be MySpace where I have to surf with my headphones off and the speakers turned down, it’s still annoying when you run into it.

Some people put music on their site to create some type of “atmosphere” for their visitors…like you’re stepping into a gallery or your local Pottery Barn. Or, instead of music, they’ll greet their customers with an audio message from themselves.

While music in your local mall or chain boutique might be useful, these tactics don’t really fly in the online world for a couple reasons:

1. A lot of people do their surfing at work. If they land on your page and their speakers start blasting your music or your audio greeting, that tells everyone in the office that they’re surfing the web and NOT working. Your visitor will end up leaving your page in search of one that’s quieter and less likely to get them fired.

2. A lot of people surf with their headphones on. While that solves the problem of your music invading the common space, it can get really painful for your visitor if your music is too loud or if their speakers are turned up. I often have my earbuds on when I’m on the web and there’s nothing more painful than have a million decibels shoot straight into your ear canal because someone thought it was clever to have their iTunes playlist running in the background of their websites at full blast. How much you want to bet that I or anyone else will want to hang around on your page after we’ve gone deaf?

3. Unlike stores, galleries, and craft shows, people don’t visit websites to “hang out” or take in the “atmosphere”. This is one reason why music works at your local Starbucks and doesn’t work on your website. In fact, try going to Starbucks.com and see if you hear the same music you hear in their stores playing on their website when you first arrive. Thought not.

People online are usually goal oriented. They want to visit a website, find what they’re looking for, then leave. Making someone scramble around looking for a way to turn off your music or turn down their speakers gets in the way of their goal and frustrates them. And frustrated people abandon things that frustrate them.

Now this is not to say that you shouldn’t have music or any kind of sound on your website. In my recent audio download, “10 Steps to Getting More Traffic on Your Website“, I talked a bit about how you can use audio to help increase traffic for your website. In certain situations and applications, music and audio can certainly be useful. The key is to do it right:

1. Give your visitors control over what they hear. Don’t force your visitors to listen to your music or your voice the moment they land on your website. Let them be able to turn the sound on or off and also let them be able to control the volume.

2. Have a good reason to have sound on your website. If your main motivation for having sound on your website is that it seems like a cool thing to do, you need to rethink that motivation. Most people aren’t going to buy something or sign up for your mailing list just because you have cool music playing in the background. In most cases, music or audio that has no real purpose ends up just being a distraction. Unless your business is music or music related, people aren’t going to visit your website to listen to music. That’s what radios and iPods are for.

3. This also applies to videos as well. One of my biggest pet peeves with some of these video sharing sites like YouTube and blip.tv is that they autostart their videos. If your video has sound, autostarting the video has the same effect as autostarting audio. Again, you need to give your visitors control over whether they want to watch your video or not.

So that’s one of my web pet peeves. What’s yours? Post a comment and tell us your rant!

P.S. Thanks to wren2000 for inspiring this post and for Maxell for the above ad image…that has to be one of the most famous ads ever.