Opitimizing Your Website with Multimedia

Multimedia has enhanced websites by adding a number of techniques to content, these devices help make websites more interesting and interactive.  Traditional reading in educational books and manuals have applied pictures and graphs for additional imagery to help better understand the text but interactive correspondence was not applicable.  Now most reading is done on mobile devices and websites have come to use visuals to optimize their content and Google rankings.  There are three main cognitive learning styles: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. All have been utilized to teach and advertise information in the online environment.

Visuals

 

A common saying in the culinary field is that "the eye eats first."  This means that if we like what we see we'll give it our attention.  With a huge variety of websites to choose from a webmaster must have their website stand-out from the rest to get noticed. Eye-catching visuals helps keep visitors on your webpage and it will make your site more memorable for future visits.  Embedding video's or audio podcast help visitor's grasp the content quickly for an easy user experience.

Audio

Hearing what you need to know works well when using mobile devices.  You can be hands-free and still get the just of what you were looking for without viewing a monitor.  Texting and driving is a nationwide campaign that is gaining momentum so the thought of going to a website and listening to ads and content adds a safety element to the hundred of thousands mobile device users.  This form of multimedia is used more for displaying music but adding your voice to a podcast is relatively easy to produce and distribute.

Kinesthetic

Interactivity is the most used technique for websites.  There are clickable links, pictures and content that prompt the user to take action and communicate through interactive techniques.  Now with touch screens and voice activated technology, interaction between IoT objects and human users is daily.  Multimedia has enhanced communications by using all of the cognitive learning styles.  Each style used properly will create a specific experience and if the experience is enjoyed by the website visitor, they will return. 

Specifying which technique is best would depend on the learning style of the individual website visitor, whatever style of learning works best for them is the form of multimedia they will prefer.  Best practice is to use all 3 techniques within your website.  Most importantly though, create an awesome website.