Using video on your website

Once we tell a client it is possible, their normal assumption is that the video will be hosted on their website using the content management system that we’d provided them with (normally ExpressionEngine), however, although this is possible, it’s not normally what we recommend. There are a few reasons for this:

• Videos are often very large in filesize (especially HD/4K videos), meaning that when users view them they will be using quite a bit of your website’s bandwidth
• They normally need to be converted into multiple filetypes to ensure they work in all web browsers (google chrome, firefox, safari, internet explorer etc) and on all devices
• We normally want to customise the player so that it sits well within the website’s design

Most of these points mean it can be very time consuming to host these yourselves, fortunately, there are a few services out there that can do all of this for you and make it very easy to embed on your website.

We generally recommend using Vimeo, simply because it’s free (unless you want to customise the player), really simple to use, supports all browsers and devices and its player looks elegant enough to fit in with most of our clients’ website designs. You also have the option of upgrading to a Vimeo Pro account for a small fee. Doing so, allows you to remove Vimeo’s logo from the video player and also enables you to change the players colour, meaning it’ll fit perfectly in with your company brand colours.

Granger’s International recently produced an amazing video with Ben Saunders (the British polar explorer and endurance athlete). We then worked with them so that they could embed this video into the main area of their homepage, which really brings the page to life.

You can view the video in action on their homepage here: 

https://​grangers​-usa​.com/

Here is another site we’ve built utilising video.

2de​greesnet​work​.com