The advantage of embedding the tour's thumbnail directly into your webpage:
It requires only one mouse click to launch the virtual tour.
The disadvantages:
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It requires you to make space available on your webpage for a 100-pixel square thumbnail - you may feel this conflicts with your website's design/styling.
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Some of your site's visitors may not choose to view the virtual tour, but since the thumbnail is visible on your page, the virtual tour is already loading, streaming data from the PanaViz servers, placing image data into the browser's cache. This can cause a lot of unnecessary bandwith being used and therefore we do not recommend this method. Please refer to our recommended method, linking to a virtual tour launching page.
The advantages of linking to a virtual tour launching page:
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You can use any type of visual link to your virual tour - your own graphic, image thumnail, or a simple text link. This gives you better control of the styling of your web page.
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A virtual tour launching page can contain more specific information about the virtual tour: How it operates, how to navigate the virtual tour, explanitory text, etc. It gives you an opportunity to educate your site's visitors about your virtual tour before they actually view it.
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PanaViz creates a virtual tour launching page for you, or you can make your own to more closely match the look & feel of your website.
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Bandwidth will not be wasted because the launch thumbnail is located in the dedicated virtual tour launch page, assuring that we will be streaming data only into people's computers who have chosen to view the virtual tour.
The disadvantage:
It requires two mouse clicks to view the virtual tour.