An important consideration for us when re-designing our website was how to integrate video into it. We’re a video production company so we obviously had to have video. For us, not having it would be like a Verizon store without phones on display. Since web video is the new frontier of video production, we really wanted to show it off in all of its glory. In the end, we decided to organically integrate video into our site.
The easiest way to add video to a website it to post it on You Tube, Vimeo, or another video sharing site and embed it. Another option is to go with Brightcove, Ooyala, or another online video platform. There are a lot of great options available and it really depends on what message you want to deliver, who you want to deliver it to, and how much of a role you want video to play in that delivery.
What we mean by organic integration is to work it into the overall design of the site. Take our homepage for example. The videos are a part of the scroll bar at the top of the page. The About page on our site is another example. The video doesn’t take up a lot of space and it sits within the page the same way a still image would. The other aspect of organic integration is how the video plays. Rather than playing within the page or taking you to another site, the video player appears as an overlay and darkens out the screen behind it. We feel that this provides more of a personalized viewing experience making it less likely that the viewer will be distracted by the the content on the rest of the page.
Ultimately, the way to integrate video into your website is up to you. When it comes to web video, there is only one “do” and one “don’t” that we here at Seven/Seventy-Nine feel very strongly about. The “do” is “do have video on your website.” Video is such a powerful way to spread a message and it has become easy to host crisp-looking video on the Internet so to not have it on your website is to miss out on a marketing opportunity. The “don’t” of web video is “don’t have it automatically start playing.” How many times have you gone to a website and been startled by a sudden voice or music of a video that automatically started playing? This is especially embarrassing when it happens at work. Having a video auto play on a website ignores the reality that the Internet is an active medium where people actively seek out information. A cornerstone of this is concept is control. If someone wants to watch a video on your website, they will and they will do it when they feel it is appropriate.
If you’re considering a website re-design, then you should give serious thought to including video in that re-design and to adding that video as a natural part of the site design. If you want to add video to your website but don’t want to redesign it, that is fine too and there are many great options available (which we would love to discuss with you). Just make sure your video doesn’t automatically start playing.
