Music that cannot be turned off

Ever get stuck on a website that blared music at you, with no warning? And then, you look for a volume control or off switch, and there is none – you’re reduced to scrambling for the volume control on your speakers while your co-workers are wondering what your up to!

That’s just plain rude behavior (the loud music, not the scrambling!) and is so easy to fix. Yet so many beginners think – ‘Hey, let’s add a soundtrack to our website!’ So they add a MP3, WAV or MIDI formatted pieced of music (popular ways that sounds are stored on a computer), and force the music on a visitor.

Aside from the lack of volume control, this also means a large music file needs to download when a page is loaded, which slows access to your website to a crawl.

Better choice: create a small jQuery-based music player (either one song, or a whole jukebox) and let the player download alone (it can be made very small). Then, if a visitor wants some tunes, they can click and select from the small player you created, which in turn will grab the music when it is requested! Now that’s music to my ears!