I was thinking of ways to make my portfolio more appealing and interesting. One of my ideas was to implement background music on my pages. What do you guys think to it? Do you use it? Does it work?
No No No No and No. Music is very annoying and personally I think it is unprofessional. You might want to take a look at this article. http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1437
Yeah... whenever I see someone who uses music on their site they're marked as inexperienced and/or unprofessional in my mind.
That's a Nay. Music takes a long while to load (this is both annoying and uses up more bandwidth). It is also very annoying as people browsing your site might have different music tastes and might be listening to their own music.
If your portfolio is a complete flash material, I'd advice putting action based sounds, for eg. when a user clicks on a button to enlarge one of the site screenshots it pops up a sound! But continually flowing background music is scrict No No! If you have a simple site with no flash etc but still want to make it more appealing and interesting, I'd advice making use of AJAX , it gives A NICE FEEL to the page. Cheers
Let me add my vote for nay as well. It takes way too long to load. There are exceptions of course, and if you must - consider adding something to also turn it off.
how annoying is it when you are listening to something and sall the sudden someones myspace page song or a site bg sound starts clashing with your music. death to your ears.
Yes, background music is a BIG no no. For one reason, out of about a 1000, lets say a prospective client found your portfolio while doing a google search (or from any search engine). A lot of people will open 4-5 results at a time and minimize them, and then look at them one by one. Well, lets say your prospective client does this, and your web page starts playing music. Your client is going to look through his taskbar/tabs, find the page making noise, and close it.
Its simple, everyone has a different taste in music, what you may like someone else may not like. Do you want to lose customers because of music taste =]
lol.... I was waiting for that.. A good compromise if you would like music but dont want to bother visitors unless their really into your site, is to add an equalizer to the top right of your site so that they see that there is streaming music. Then put "Off - On" next to the equalizer with Off bold so that they know it is currently off (and its not their speakers being turned off) but can be turned on.
I agree mostly with what everyone else has been saying - don't include music! On the other hand though, if your designing a really creative site (that perhaps uses flash) then you could consider using it. If you do decide to use music make sure you use good quality samples (not midi files) and also, always ensure you give the site visitor the option to turn the music off!!!
Nay - also: No, non, Nein, Não, нет, respectfully, but a music video that's not obtrusive..well maybe yes..