I visit a lot of websites every day. Sometimes, I visit a lot of websites at once. Well, not exactly. I can only read one page at at time (which is a bummer, I know) but I do often have many, many tabs open on the top of my browser. Especially when I find a post with a lot of great links – like a blog hop, for instance.. I’ll go through and open them ALL to check out over the course of the next hour or day, depending on what other things I have going on.
And I have to say, one of my biggest pet peeves is when one of these multiple tabs starts talking or singing! Websites that have auto-play – whether it be a music player, an ad or a video, drive me NUTS! The worst is when more than one of the tabs you have open have auto-play. Then you get all sorts of crazy noises going on. Not to mention, somehow they are always the loudest thing ever playing and sometimes it scares me and I jump a mile out of my computer chair before I scramble to figure out what page it is.
Can someone explain how this is beneficial to your site? If someone can’t figure out how to turn off the auto-play because you have it buried somewhere or at the very bottom of you page, they might just close out of the page and not check out your site. Sure you’d have that initial “hit”, but will they bookmark you and come back later? Probably not. I know I don’t!
(And I have to say one of the worst offenders is Hanson.net. Which I visit frequently. Multiple times a day. And if I stay on the home page too long I hear “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” coming from their promo for 5 of 5. I don’t like hearing it at the shows and I certainly don’t like hearing it coming out my computer speakers!)