8 min read
Sound isn't utilised enough in Website Design.
During the glory days of MySpace or any related early blog websites, you'd commonly find lots of sound filling the website through sound effects, music upon entering someones profile, lots of playlists etc. It made each profile so much more personalised and unique as well as sometimes annoying, unfitting and chaotic.
As the quality of website design and development has been developing, sound and music inside of a websites have quietly disappeared alongside it and for lots of good reasons too:
Too loud: entering a website that had audio in it usually played it at full volume, making the entrance to the website annoying, uncomfortable and want to make you click off instantly
Jump scare: relates to the first point with the noise levels but if you go onto a website to not only have audio played at full but also scaring you, you'd want to leave immediately.
Incorrect use: this is rather vague but when sound would be used on a website, it wouldn't fit or compliment the design or feeling of the site, making you question why it has sound in the first place
All of this alongside the lack of accessibility with requirements like the WCAG 2.2 that exist nowadays with audio inside of a website. With a larger awareness and community that exists within website design and development, I've seen some amazing agency and portfolio websites that utilise sound soo well it's made me think why more websites do not attempt to utilise sound more often especially knowing how much effect music and sound can have on an individual. Below are some websites that I personally believe utilise sound well to enhance storytelling, make websites more interactive and give us, the viewer, an extra sense to experience websites with (sound).
Winch Design is a luxury yacht architecture studio that uses a nice ambience music to better paint the feelings of holiday, travel and luxury, accompanied by a video in the hero section showing amazing visuals of water, yachts and more. Without sound inside of this site, it'd still look and feel good, but having that extra sense to experience a website more deeply makes you want to go on a holiday.
Nomadic Tribe is a interactive storytelling experience that uses voiceovers and 3D elements & animations made as a tribute to this production company's favourite comic book artist Jean Giraud. It uses an originally created soundtrack specifically for this passion project to bring many elements to life and create an amazing immersive storytelling experience. This website also won site of the year!
Brand Studio is a creative agency that hosts most of the site inside of a canvas experience instead of navigating it the traditional way of just scrolling down. Entering the site accompanies you with music that fits the branding and detailed visuals with sound effects upon hover interactions and button presses. The music also seamlessly transitions between each page visited instead of just cutting out if another page is visited which makes it a smooth experience.
Sound is enhancing, but do not overdo it.
Making sure that you do not overdo it with the sound is super important because if too much is happening on the screen, as well as audibly, there is a high chance it might overwhelm the user and lead to a poor user experience. Overdoing sound is very easy so you have to make sure that you use audio sparingly and at appropriate moments.
Making sure that any added sound follows accessibility standards.
This is an important once because you want as many people to enjoy and experience your website so making sure that it is accessible, like giving user the option to turn on and off the audio or change the level, will make sure that the website can be experienced both audibly and without any audio if the visitor wishes so. Especially with audio, there are lots of requirements that need to be followed so making sure that you can nail as many as possible is great. you can find them HERE