At Eight Arms we believe that in a digital world, content is key and sometimes the best way to grab attention is with animation or video.
A successful website is engaging, user friendly and most importantly has great content. Content can be well written and interesting but sometimes a static website containing text and image alone may not be enough to tell your story.
Internet users are now often spending less than 15 seconds on a website*. As a result we’ve adjusted our design approach in order to cater to users with shorter attention spans. However, diminishing attention spans aren’t the only reason we’re rethinking our approach. We’ve also noticed that over the years, users have shifted their time spent online towards video content and the dominance of video on the web has increased dramatically. Youtube is now the second largest search engine on the web with 6 billion hours of video content viewed each month**.
As more people engage with video on multiple devices, video content has become far more accessible than ever been before. Therefore designers and developers have begun treating video content differently. More and more websites now use video as the main focus and purpose of the website rather than an additional after thought.
At Eight Arms we embrace video content and use video to successfully promote products, brand and services. This use of video makes it easier for us to communicate businesses thoughts and ideas quickly while taking the users digital experience to a new level.
In our latest campaign with Fairtrade we were challenged to bring to life the themes from a film in a way that audiences could relate to, engage with and share socially. We used snippets of video to create a modular homepage that showed relatable footage of both the western world as well as the farmers lives in Malawi. The results speak for themselves, Fairtrade had the highest number of engagement, traffic and conversions than ever before.
We also brought video to the forefront of the Tinderflint website redesign. By including multiple 5 second edits of their current showreel within the homepage we were able to target those 15 second users, as they would instantly get a taste for the kind of work that Tinderflint produce.
These are just two of many examples where we have integrated video content alongside the more traditional use of text and imagery. At Eight Arms we believe that with ever increasing broadband and mobile internet connection speeds, video is now becoming the standard user expectation as opposed to an additional design enhancement. We predict that this trend will continue to grow over the coming years and feel there is no better time than now to start taking video content more seriously as part of your digital content strategy.
*What you think you know about the web is wrong
**Youtube the 2nd largest search engine infographic
Guest post written for Tinderflint
Lizhamburger 