Your voice and your slide show are the two things you're relying on the most to engage your webinar audience. And because as humans we're far more visual than auditory, your slides become even more important. They are no longer just a visual aid to you, the speaker; they are the visuals. This means they have to be even more engaging, intriguing and intriguing than in a face-to-face presentation.
However, the problem is all you show in your webinar has to be sent across the Internet to your participants. Even though most of them will have broadband access, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll have very fast access.
Unfortunately, this means many of the things that first come to mind in improving your slide show naturally won't work, because they will be too slow when viewed over the Internet:
- Full-size photographs
- Interesting transitions between slides
- Animated movement to elaborate a point on a slide
- Video in a slide
You have to work diligently to simplify your slides as much as possible so they are sent efficiently to your participants. If you don't, it will take a long time to load each slide, which will frustrate your audience and break up the flow of your presentation.
Ironically, the best slide format for Internet use is the very bad but all too-common format of slides containing nothing but bullet points! Why? Because these slides consist of a lot of blank space with a few squiggly bits (the letters) on them. The webinar technology can unmistakably compress this into a very small file to send across the Internet.
Here are some exact tips and techniques to ensure you can assault a happy balance, so you can compose visually intriguing slides that are still fast sufficient to send to your participants in a webinar.
Eliminate waste
If something is on a slide purely for decorative purposes, remove it.
This applies especially to photographs, which are often used (appropriately and tastefully) to add impact to a message. But something that works well in a face-to-face presentation can be too slow in a webinar.
Shrink pictures
Many professional presenters have learned not to build the amateur style of slides, full of text and bullet points; and instead use intriguing visuals. It seems a shame to lose these visuals just because you're doing a webinar!
Fortunately, there's a happy balance: The clarification is to keep the pictures, but make them smaller so they are sent more swiftly over the Internet.
Use icons
An even good option, if appropriate, is to use clip art and icons (stylish clip art and icons, of course!) rather than photographs to make your point using diagrams.
Of course, you shouldn't use the old, tacky Microsoft Clip Art collections! There are many professional alternatives available - crusade Google for "royalty free clip art" and "royalty free icons".
Fix the background
Remove any fancy graphics in the backgrounds of your slides. A plain one-colour background is best - no graphics, no textures, no enterprise logo, not even a decorative pattern. It doesn't matter what colour you choose, as long as it's a singular colour throughout. That way, the webinar software can compress it into a small packet for sending via the Internet.
Stop movement
Of course, you should remove any animation that's there purely for decorative purposes. But I assume you're experienced sufficient not to use this sort of animation anyway.
However, you should determined study all other animation, even if it's there for functional purposes, and reconsider how to remove it. The less animation you use, the faster your slides will load.
"Build" slides
There is one type of animation that is thorough - and very useful - for webinar slides, and that is the idea of a "build" or a "reveal". This is naturally where you keep adding bits to a slide as you talk about it.
Fortunately, this doesn't cause any problems at all for the webinar software. Because each step is naturally adding to what's already there, the software only has to send the bits that have changed on the screen each time - and that's quite fast.
So go ahead and use these slide "builds" to your heart's content, without worrying about any adverse impact on your webinar. In fact, it helps your presentation, because - as with their use in face-to-face presentations - your audience only sees what's relevant to them at the time.
Remove transitions
The same applies to transitions between slides. They are almost always unnecessary (even if they were being used thoughtfully to match the flow of the presentation), and they will slow down the webinar display, so remove them.
It doesn't matter how easy or complicated the transitions are; they all involve movement, and that's the killer as far as webinar speed goes.
Be especially faithful if you're using the presentation tool Prezi, which allows you to zoom nearby a "mind map" of your topic. It looks very impressive in a face-to-face presentation, but it's terrible for webinar use.
Your visuals can still be attractive!
Even if you take the knife to your slides using the guidelines above, it doesn't mean you'll end up with a bland, boring series of slides. You'll be surprised at just how intriguing you can still make your slides, even with these restrictions.
"Now YOU Can Create Professional 3D Animations, Games And Graphic Models Like Pixar and Dreamworks In 2 Hours or Less..."
0 comments:
Post a Comment