{"id":953,"date":"2014-06-16T12:59:06","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T11:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/?p=953"},"modified":"2015-04-13T13:41:49","modified_gmt":"2015-04-13T12:41:49","slug":"effective-use-of-video-on-websites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.forestsoftware.co.uk\/blog\/2014\/06\/effective-use-of-video-on-websites\/","title":{"rendered":"Effective Use of Video on Websites"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes : <\/span><\/span>

Effective Use of Video on Websites<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently there has been a lot of talk on social media such as Twitter about how your website needs to have video on it to \u201cengage\u201d your visitors.\u00a0 The author has even been told that unless you have a video on the site that there is no way that your site will feature on the first page of the Google results.<\/p>\n

This article isn\u2019t aimed at telling you why the last statement is incorrect (all I would say is that you need to check any Google results and see which results have video on the sites and which don\u2019t).\u00a0 What we are going to talk about today is how to use video effectively on your website and if you use video well it certainly can \u201cimprove\u201d the site as far as your visitors are concerned.<\/p>\n

The first thing to say is that, assuming it\u2019s not a cartoon you are producing, you need to think about the people that are going to be presenting the video.\u00a0 This can depend on the type of thing you are showing, if it\u2019s something fun then you don\u2019t necessarily want someone who\u2019s face looks as if they haven\u2019t smiled for 10 years.\u00a0 The converse to this is that if you are presenting something professional then you might want to think twice about using a young, trendy, person.<\/p>\n

Once you have thought about the subject and the presenter (and found someone to actually video it \u2013 you were not thinking about trying to record it yourself on a handycam or using the video function on your point and shoot camera and shooting the video in a dimly lit corner of your office were you?) the next thing to think about is where you are going to host it (where the video file will \u201clive\u201d).\u00a0 Basically you can either host it on your own site or on a site such as Vimeo or YouTube.\u00a0 My personal preference is YouTube<\/a> as this opens up the possibility of people finding it by stumbling across it when surfing the YouTube site, which brings me to a further point \u2013 you have to remember to have your contact details on the video somewhere so that people that are not viewing the production on your site still know how to get hold of you.<\/p>\n

To me, one of the areas where people fall down when having a video on a page on their site is having the video automatically start as soon as the page is loaded.\u00a0 This, in my view, is wrong as if your visitor is in an open office with the sound turned on on their computer and visits your page all of a sudden your message blares out across the office.\u00a0 The other problem is that not everyone has an internet connection that is capable of supporting video well, especially if they live in a rural area.\u00a0 Personally nothing makes me back out of a web page quicker than an automatically starting video.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve listed below a few videos that illustrates some of the points raised above. see if you can work out why I’ve selected them to illustrate this article – I’ve added a comment to the link where I felt it necessary.<\/p>\n