Is Your Website Missing Something?
So for those of us who have been kicking around the internet since it's first main mass-use came into play we may remember websites being very text driven... or perhaps you have chosen to forget those dark days.
Lets take a look at some examples of how the internet used to be, and thank ourselves that companies prominently stayed away from music and those terrible animated gifs!
Images sourced from web.archive.org
(The West May 10th 2000, Apple - Apr 17th 1999, YouTube 28 April 2005)
These are probably familiar websites to most people now, but you can see they look completely different to their 2015 grandchildren.
The West newspaper was very text driven and this has dramatically changed for them in 15 years. Apple on the other hand which is the earliest of all the snapshots shown has realised that images are key to selling their product and so has adapted to change early. YouTube is the surprise of all three in that for a video-based website they have no video displayed. We should bear in mind that "video" is their product and yet not one is shown on the front page of their website.
So what has changed in the 15 years between heavily text-based websites and now?
Well, images are key - we as humans can search quicker to find what we want with pictures compared to text and the change has come mainly through changes in design that has been allowed by ever increasing internet speeds.
But my website has pictures on it, what does this mean for my business going forward?
Well, just as pictures had it over text, video has it over pictures. As users, we want more content with less effort and video does exactly that. We can watch it and learn more, see more and ultimately feel more than the combined use of pictures and text.
We are already seeing heavy integration of video into news and company websites and this will only increase as video production becomes more accessible and internet speeds and ISP bandwidth continues to get faster and larger. Not mention the continued development of video optimization which allows for smaller file sizes and therefore streaming times to reduce.
Our prediction, and those of many others;- videos use is only going to increase on websites. so expect those front pages to start containing more and more videos.
Will you business be joining them? Are you are media leader like Apple?
If you'd like to chat about video and it's use within your business then get in touch and we'll go from there;- We're only too happy to talk video!
Beard Out.
