Adding video to your website doesn't need to be a complicated or expensive exercise.  With free and powerful services available like YouTube and Vimo, you can easily harness their power to your advantage. The video will appear in your website, however, it will be stored and delivered by the video sharing service.

The main benefit of this method is that you won't have to pay for a streaming video hosting service or for any extra bandwidth your video might use.  However, be aware that video uploaded to these websites will be available for public viewing, so don’t use this method for publishing videos you only intend to share with your website audience.

Following is a quick run-down on how to add video to your website, for this example I'm going to use the YouTube service, but you could use one of the many other video sharing services:

1. Signup to a YouTube account.
2. Once you've signed up and logged in, go to the My Account page and click on Upload New Video
3. YouTube can handle most popular video formats, but if you need to add home made DVD footage, then you'll need to convert it from DVD format into AVI or MPG video. Here's a guide on how to convert DVD's to AVI's.
4. Once you've uploaded the video file, YouTube will take a couple of minutes to compress and optimise it for viewing on the web.
5. You should now be able to view the video you’ve just uploaded by going to My Uploaded Videos and clicking on the title of the video you’ve just added.
6. When viewing your video, you’ll notice a number details to the right of it. To embed this video into your website, copy the code in the Embed field then paste it into your preferred website page using your content management system.

You should now have a video window embedded in your web page for all your website visitors to see.

Categories:  Home, Web Design