More and more actor websites I stumble upon seem to auto-start a reel or trailer or some other video as soon as the home page loads. This is just bad and... impolite. Imagine every website you went to, before you could read anything or click on anything, your speakers will be hijacked.
Play buttons exist for a reason!
I truly believe in every single tip I write, and yes, sometimes there are exception, that's why the tips says "but if you do". There is a multitude of lovely sites out there that use a video as a background to the website. If you do, simply mute the video before it loads that's the common etiquette. Just look at Facebook or Twitter, as you scroll down your feed you will see videos activate and start playing, but they won't make a sound until you decide you want to hear it.
Technical Tip: If you're using YouTube as a host, you will not even have that option, so don't waste your time trying to figure it out. If you're using YouTube you simply need to remove the autoplay. Sorry, but you do. Vimeo does offer the option of setting the volume to zero, and of course, if you host your own MP4, HTML5 has a lot of options you can use including muting.
