Blogging has come on a long way since its infancy. All bloggers could do back in the day was write a post, give it a title and maybe include a few hyperlinks if they were lucky. Nowadays however there are all sorts of widgets, plugins and extensions to help make the blogging experience a richer one, both for blog owners and their readers. WordPress has undoubtedly had a big part to play in this development, allowing the masses to develop the open source code and customise blogs to suit their needs. The other blogging platforms aren’t too far behind however and their progress is driven by the very human desire to make things better and more engaging.

One such development that many blog owners are taking advantage of these days is music players that they can either embed into their posts or individual pages. A couple of examples of these are the ‘Audio Player’ plugin for WordPress , which can actually be imbedded in any blog if you know a bit of code. Or Groove Shark, which is a customisable widget that will play music on your blog from their own diverse and extensive collection.

Using music on your site can really enhance a visitor’s experience. If you are trying to create an ambiance or have a clear theme on your blog, music can reinforce this. You might also like to showcase your own music on your site so you can get feedback or maybe catch the ear of someone in the industry? What you need to be careful of however is crossing the line between enhancing a users experience and putting them off by forcing your audio choices on them.

It is worth remembering that everyone has different tastes and may not like the music on your blog. Also, these days many people have their own music players open whilst browsing the net and don’t want their songs interrupted by what you think they want to listen to. With this is mind it is rarely a good idea to have music start playing automatically when people arrive on the site, but instead give them the option to turn it on if they so wish.

For example, on this site the music player is closed when people arrive

But if you want to you can open the music player by clicking on the arrow and the song starts to play. In this case it is Michael Jackson’s – Man In The Mirror…classic!

The key is, by all means give your visitors something to listen to when they visit your site and read your posts, but don’t try to force anything down their throats or assume they want to listen to your choice of tunes.

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Using Music on Your Blog – Carefully is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

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