There are a few WordPress themes that feature HTML5 audio players and we hope to see more.Īnother successful deployment of the persistent audio player is on the Pandora website. The technology is available, you just have to find the right developer to make it happen for your site. Today, an audio player should always be persistent on your site. Since the pop-up player is in its own browser window, just clicking on the main page will bring the main page forward and layer the player behind it making it that much more difficult to use. It pops up and over the left side of the page, making it very difficult for the user to navigate the site. As you can see in the screenshot of the DJDownload website below, the pop-over player gets in the way. The user has the ability to play a track and navigate throughout the store or their library, as shown below without interruption.įinding a way for users to listen to music uninterrupted while surfing the site is one of Beatport’s competitive advantages over its rivals, many of whom continue to deploy pop-over players, which are problematic for a number of reasons.
This is similar to the iTunes experience, which has always had a playback feature in the head of the software as shown below. Then try and navigate between pages and you’ll see that the player consistently remains fixed and the audio continues to play. You can jump back and forth and pause/play your track selections and there is a visual representation of the track with a cursor in the timeline that helps you know where you are. Play any track on the Beatport home page and the track is added to a playlist found by the drop down arrow to the right of the bright green “add to cart” button in the header. This forced Beatport to quickly innovate and come up with a solution for the mobile web, which you can from the screenshot posted see below. When Apple decided not to support Adobe’s Flash Player plugin, Beatport customers could not play music from the existing Flash site on an iPhone or iPad. Second, it was to enable their audio player to work on Apple iPhones. Flash is notoriously difficult for search engines to crawl, so converting the experience into HTML would helps Google, Bing and other search engines efficiently crawl the site. First, it improved search engine optimization of the Beatport site. Advances in HTML5/CSS3 and jQuery saw Beatport convert their entire experience into an SEO friendly website. One of the earliest and best implementations of a persistent audio player, Beatport first innovated with a full, all-Flash experience.
( In the interest of full disclosure, the author of this post is an adviser to and holds shares in the company.) check out the player in the screen shot below. This advancement will allow listeners to enjoy uninterrupted audio while navigating the site and following their favorite “DJs.” It will surely increase engagement with 8tracks and subsequently, listening hours. The best site for hand-crafted Internet radio, where user-generated playlists are all the rage, recently converted to a persist audio player experience. Before we get into the how and why of persistent audio players, here are a few more examples of sites employing these players successfully. The Stylico-DJ-Template features a persistent HTML5 player in the left sidebar.
Some are even creating themes for WordPress with enhanced audio player experiences, so you get all that for free or a very low cost compared to custom development. swf wrappers that kill your site’s SEO, it is finally possible. After many years of ugly pop-up players or Flash-enabled players in Flash. Wait, did we say that a user can navigate between pages while the audio player remains persistent and it doesn’t disrupt the audio stream? Yes! That’s what we said. That means you can’t just deploy any audio player, you’ve got to deploy something with persistence across all site pages, allowing a consistent listening experience while surfing with no obvious break in the action. When serving up those audio tracks, nothing is more frustrating than having a song interrupted while navigating between pages of a website. It’s the audio player, of course! If you’ve got a hot music site, then you’ve got to have a functioning audio player, so your audience can play back music featured on your website or in your mobile web application (notice I said mobile web application, not mobile application).
What is the single most important feature of any music website? C’mon, don’t let us stump you that easily.