Streaming video's the latest cool trick to promote your website, right?

Well... only if your visitors can see it.

I recently came across a site with lots of videos on something that I'm keenly interested in, and I couldn't wait to watch them. Each one was supposed to last about 4 minutes, so they couldn't take that long to load up... could they?

Well, not if you're in the same country as the site, perhaps. The trouble is, that site and myself were on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

I clicked on the first track, and it buffered for several minutes - then it flickered into life and its producer said, "Hi! My name is..."

The video then froze, and buffered for several more minutes before the guy in the picture jerkily moved his hands for a split second and gave me half his name... and then it froze again. Cue more buffering.

This was not what I'd call streaming video - it was more like gridlock.

Now, at this point I would usually have given up and left the site, but I really wanted to watch those videos, so I hung on.

I kid you not, it took an hour and a half before the buffering got near the end - of a video which, remember, was supposed to take a mere 4 minutes to play through.

It was at this point that I made my big mistake. Once the buffering had finished, I decided, I'd be able to watch the whole thing properly - and I might as well do it with a cup of coffee in my hand.

Wrong move. In the time it took to switch the kettle on, the buffering had finally completed... and gone back to zero. Hopefully, I clicked on Play, and the buffering began again. Right from the start.

Now, this ought to be a one-off horror story... but it isn't. There are lots of sites that offer video and other kinds of streaming media that only work the way they should if you're quite near to them, or else you're using broadband (I don't, because I reckon that the best way to ensure that all the content on my site is easily accessible to all site visitors is to test it on a dial-up connection).

If you want to use some video without antagonizing all those of your visitors who can't get at it easily, it's a good idea to offer an alternative.

1. If possible, present it in a format that can be downloaded. A download manager that can collect it overnight, or resume an interrupted download when it's more convenient, can take the sting out of the waiting; or

2. It that's not feasible, offer them a transcript. Write down everything you're saying on the video, and let them just download it as an e-book.

If you're working from a script, that should take very little effort - if not, it's worth the extra work to play it through and just transcribe your words.

(Do get rid of those distracting "um"s and "er"s, though - they creep into most videos at some point, and your visitors will probably take clarity a lot more seriously than exact fidelity to the recorded version!)

Your visitors will love you for it - it's a quick and easy way to show you care about them.

If you don't, you're going to lose a lot of hard-earned traffic, because a gridlocked video has just the same effect as gridlocked vehicles - exasperated visitors avoid the place in future.