How to Add Video to Your Site

icon1 Posted by Rochelle in How To... on 04 4th, 2008 | 5 responses

Recently someone on Mark’s forum asked how to add video to his niche store. It was a good question with an easy answer. Thanks to video sites such as YouTube you can quickly add video to your site with minimal effort. Best of all, you don’t even have to host videos if you use this method as YouTube and several other video sites will allow you to display the videos on your site but have them stay on YouTube (or similar sites).

There are several site you can get video from but YouTube is the biggest. The instructions here are for using video from YouTube but the steps are similar for other video sites.

 

My instructions to add video to your site:

Step One
 Go to YouTube and find a video you want to add. For the purposes of this tutorial I am going to look for a ghost hunting video to add to my Tools For Ghost Hunter site.
  
 

Copy the ‘Embed’ code in the grayish box to the right of the video screen:

Image of the 'Embed' link in YouTube
Step Two
 Log in to your site’s Admin and click the ‘Content Pages‘ tab and ‘Create Content Page‘ link.
  
 Edit the meta tags and name the page something like, "Video of (whatever video is about)." Don’t save yet.
  
 Enter some text in the ‘Page Content‘ section. Write a brief description of the video. You may want to include a header above the text that is H2. Click the < > button and paste the code from YouTube UNDER the text. Click ‘ok‘ to apply the code and close the HTML editor. Don’t save the page yet.
  
 Here is what the opened HTML editor looks like before I add the YouTube code:
Image of BANS HTML editor before I add YouTube code
  
 Here is what the opened HTML editor looks like after I add the YouTube code (the blue text is the YouTube code):
Image of BANS HTML editor after I add YouTube code
  
 Note: You may need to add a few spaces between your text and the video box. You can center the video box buy clicking on it and then clicking on the ‘Justify Center‘ button.
  
 Click to the right of the video box and press enter once or twice, so your mouse is under the video box. Add a sentence or two stating where you got the video from. I like to add, "Video is courtesy of YouTube." I do this for two reasons:
 
  1. I think it’s only fair to give credit back to YouTube for allowing people to link to their site.
  2. I don’t want visitors to think that I am showing unauthorized video. It is always possible that video on YouTube isn’t authorized but they are generally pretty good about policing what is shown. I could be misguided in this thought but it makes me feel better.
  
 You may also want to add the following under the ‘Courtesy of…’ statement: "(If the area above this message is blank then please try using a different browser to view the video)." I have found that Opera doesn’t show YouTube videos and there may be others that also prevent them from being seen. Fortunately I have had no problems with Firefox or Internet Explorer.
  
 Save your page and view your site for errors. Or, better yet, view your new video.
.

How easy was that? Now go add some video : )

Rochelle

5 Responses to “How to Add Video to Your Site”

  1. David Welton says:
    April 7, 2008 at 9:22 am

    Hi Rochelle,

    Again excellent instructions, when I go to my admin and create a content page and write a few lines of text. Then click the button it brings up an error which says

    internet explorer script error
    line 65
    char 52
    error unterminated string constant
    code 0
    url http://www.gsxrmania.com/scripts/source_xhtml.htm

    Have you any ideas please

    kind regards
    Dave

  2. Rochelle says:
    April 7, 2008 at 10:58 am

    Dave,

    When you added the video code did you add it directly to the content area or did you click the button first and add the code to the pop-up window (the one that shows the code for the content area)?

    If you added it directly to the content area then you need to delete it from there, click the button, and add the code to the new window that opens.

    But I don’t really know what the cause is. If you figure it out please share it here in case someone else has the same problem.

    Rochelle

  3. David Welton says:
    April 7, 2008 at 12:55 pm

    Hi Rochelle,

    The error occurs when I click the to open the pop up window to input my code, thank you for the quick reply

    Dave

  4. David Welton says:
    April 7, 2008 at 12:57 pm

    Sorry Rochelle the was missing out the mail above which is the button I have pressed

  5. Mohammed Hughes says:
    May 23, 2010 at 1:18 pm

    Can anyone suggest a good website which has tutorials for Site Promotion ?~~-

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