Prepare Better – And Faster – Webinar Slides

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, attractive and appealing than in a face-to-face presentation.

However, the problem is everything 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 enhancing your slide show simply won’t work, because they will be too slow when viewed over the Internet:

• Full-size photographs
• Interesting transitions between slides
• Animated movement to illustrate 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 contain a lot of blank space with a few squiggly bits (the letters) on them. The webinar technology can easily compress this into a very small file to send across the Internet.

Here are some specific tips and techniques to ensure you can strike a happy balance, so you can design visually attractive slides that are still fast enough to transmit 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 attractive visuals. It seems a shame to lose these visuals just because you’re doing a webinar!

Fortunately, there’s a happy balance: The solution is to keep the pictures, but make them smaller so they are sent more quickly over the Internet.

Use icons

An even better 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 – search 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 company logo, not even a decorative pattern. It doesn’t matter what colour you choose, as long as it’s a single colour throughout. That way, the webinar software can compress it into a small packet for sending via the Internet.