Forbes says that in about 4 years 80% of all consumer Internet traffic will be people watching online videos. HubSpot research helpfully ads that 53% of consumers want to see more video content from brands. These are only a few of the stats that prove the efficiency of videos in business promotion. This means that having some on your website is a must. However, a small business website hosted on a shared server will be quite limited in their use of this visual. You’ll need to get quite creative to make the most of your limited resources.
3 Tips for Using Videos in Small Business Web Design
1. Go bold but light
When your bandwidth is limited, creating a spectacular website with lots of ‘heavy’ video will be impossible. So, interactive designs like this might be out of your reach for now. Therefore, you need to make the small video elements that you can realistically incorporate into the website truly striking. If the video is memorable and takes the spotlight on the page, it’s bound to give your website a boost.
Check out this kind of design from Fernando Maclen. The video here is blurred, which makes it stand out among other websites. Yet, it doesn’t distract you from the buttons, which are the real focus of the page.
With a small website, you’ll need to go for something like this. That’s why a full-scale background video and animation like this might not be a good choice. Even when they are simple, these elements take a while to load. However, you can consider using a minimally animated image as a striking background. The animation creates the illusion of movement, which makes the website appear more dynamic.
2. Optimize the video properly
Format and optimization make a huge difference when using video in web design. Sometimes, you’ll be able to integrate a better clip into your page simply by playing around with the right codecs.
You’ll also need to choose your web host with extreme care. Today there are many services that offer good and affordable packages with a huge amount of bandwidth. These are the deals you should be looking at when selecting beginner web hosting.
As to video compression, use tools, like MpegStreamclip or HandBrake to compress the file size without losing the quality of the video. You’ll also need to convert the file to HTML5 in order to make it both ‘lighter’ and easier for modern web browsers to load.
3. Use other platform’s bandwidth
What do you do if you have an amazing product video but your web hosting package doesn’t have enough bandwidth to use it?
You simply don’t embed it into the website directly. Instead, load it onto your YouTube channel (if you don’t have any, get one right now). Then, embed the video from there. This will be a bit tricky, but it allows you to use almost any kind of video. This method, however, won’t work for background videos and similar design elements.
When using this technique, be sure to customize the video player so that the visitors watching it from your website aren’t redirected to your YouTube channel. Also, make sure that the clip uploads properly onto the hosting platform and complies with its requirements.
