Some of our clients ask us to add background musing on their Joomla website. Typical requirements include:
- I want to play Song X on my website.
- I want the music to play on all browsers.
- I don’t want the music to stop if the person moves from one page to the other.
Playing music is not that hard, playing the music on all (recent) browsers is not that hard either, but what’s hard is ensuring that the music continues to play once you move between pages.
How do accommodate this request?
We install a module called JBGMusic. It does work nicely, sometimes it requires some programming tweaks here and there but other than that it fits the client’s needs. However, there is an issue, this module uses Flash. Some of our clients don’t want to use Flash on their websites, so what do we do in this case?
If our client doesn’t want Flash on his website, we create a custom module that will popup a window and plays music by using the Windows Media Player. However, this module has a problem because if the website’s visitor has disabled popups, then he won’t be able to hear the music. In this case, what we do is that we detect if the visitor has disabled popups, and in this case we ask the visitor to manually click on a prominent link if he wants to hear the music.
In any case, we believe that music should not be added to any website because:
- It’s annoying: Most visitors are annoyed by the music played on the website, especially if the visitors do not know you nor your business personally (which tends to constitute 99% of the visitors to websites getting real traffic).
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It results in a high bounce rate: Statistically, most visitors tend to immediately leave the website if they hear any music played on the website.
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It gives the impression that your website is old: Playing music on your website is so passé, it’s so 1990’s. Your visitors will get the impression that your website was developed in the previous millennium even though it was developed a few months ago.
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It doesn’t provide any benefit: Playing music on your website will never provide any benefit to your business or your organization. In fact, as you can see from the above, it will do more harm than good, and will give the impression of unprofessionalism.
Having said all the above, if you still want to add music to your website, then we’re here to help. It will takes 1 hour to do install and customize the JBGMusic module (a total cost of $75 based on our current fees), or 8 hours ($600) to develop and install the custom solutions.