Remember I looked at those welcome clips in a previous blog post? Here’s one way you can add them to your site really easily.

Audio Generator is a well-known resource for recording audio for websites. It’s especially useful for those who don’t want to go to the trouble of getting microphones etc because you can record it straight down a phone line.

In the true spirit of the adventurer, I tried it out for you so that you can get an idea of how useable it is and how the end product sounds (and yes, that really is my cat, Betty, making a guest appearance).

Useability:
Easy peasy. The whole process, from signup to the perfectly created masterpiece (!) you can listen to above, took about 30 minutes. The recording was the quickest part, the sign up and navigating around the site took the most time, although the site is very user friendly. So, once set up, it doesn’t take long to record and post the recording.

Getting it onto my site was also easy. You’re reading this in Typepad, I literally changed my page view to HTML and pasted in a code I was given, once I’d finished my recording (I was allowed to choose my colour and style of button too).

Other Features:

There’s an option to send audio postcards to people, which is a nice twist on the newsletter or ezine and can be built into your marketing strategy.

You also get a dedicated line for your clients to leave testimonials - they can also leave super-testimonials where they add a photo and some text - all very slick…

Cost:
$29 dollars per month but there is a free 21 day trial period.

Downside:
The telephone line quality isn’t great but you do have the option of either using a microphone to record your messages or have your recordings done for you by your friendly local audio editor and have them uploaded to the site.

Whilst my message took me a few seconds to record, I would obviously never post my welcome message to my website with my cat purring in the background i.e. it was an easy take because it was only an illustration. You’ll want your welcome message to sound as blip free as possible so you might need a couple of tries to get it right. You get the option to record again but you do have to get the whole ‘take’ again each time, as there’s no going back to edit it later (or add music etc to it).

Verdict:
Good stuff for the non-techie but weigh up the quality issues that go with it.

If anyone has any experience of using this or other similar resources then I’m all ears…