No Background Music Please, We’re Websites

If you’re thinking about placing background music on your site, stop right now. Along with large animated GIFs, this has to be one of the tackiest things you can do with your site. 

SEOMoz has a list of reasons you can bring to your clients should you ever get asked to do this. Among my top picks are -

• It’s obtrusive: It’s forcing something down the users throat they didn’t ask for. Users expect web pages to contain useful information, not carry a tune.
• Not all browsers and operating systems support multimedia content: “If you had to choose between some users being able to hear music and some having their browser crash OR having everyone be able to view the site without any issues, which would you choose?”
• It slows things down: Having music playing will decrease the performance of the site, especially on slower machines.
• Not everyone may like your music: What some people consider ambient and pleasant, others may find to be annoying, elevator music.
• It hogs bandwidth: If it’s a high traffic site having music may run the risk of putting it over it’s bandwidth limit and costing extra money.Bottom line, if you’re not on Myspace, don’t make your site look like it belongs there. There’s a reason why they were rated as the worst site in the world!