To Flickr or to Youtube

There are many professionally designed methods to put photos and videos onto your main website. This is the recommended route if you want your website to look serious.

But, there is no reason why you cannot put in photos and videos onto your blog, using the many free or low-priced website sources.

The most popular, and the most user friendly are Flickr and Youtube.

Part of the charm of Flickr and Youtube is that they act like a type of a blog. Some people opt for purely a Flickr or Youtube presence, uploading their videos and photo and posting them with comments, to maintain a photo or video journal.

You can connect to your Flickr and Youtube posts by simply having a link on your blog, or by actually downloading a video onto your blog posting. Unfortunately, you can upload only from your Youtube account directly to your blog. Photos need to be uploaded from your files (from your hard drive, or other file sources, not from Flickr), or just linked to from a Flickr page.

The Advantages of Web Video

In my earlier blogs, I wrote about the useful additions of images. A picture is (sometimes) worth a thousand words. But of course, the picture has to be a good one.

The same with web video. Often, a a video can interest a reader to further investigate what else is available on the website.

Some helpful ways to use videos are:

• Videos to show short samples of the organizations activities.

This of often used to introduce the reader with the website writers and contributers. It also provides information on the main projects and involvements of the website's members. It is a video version of a photo gallery.

Often, movie trailers for film festivals and introduction to box office shows can be used in these introductions.

These videos tend to be short, usually 3o seconds-3 minutes long.

The Hot Docs film festival for documentary films has its trailers running as short as 30 seconds.

They have uploaded all their trailers on Youtube. You can also watch the trailers on their website with Flash Video.

• Videos presenting information and direction.

These videos tend to be medium length - usually 5-10 minutes long.

Martha Stewart's website has a whole link of videos where she demonstrates anything from flag folding to cooking chicken dishes.

This information tends to be complete, from beginning to end.

Martha's videos were done in Flash Video.

• Videos for complete speeches or interviews.

The CBC News Sunday often has full interviews posted on their website.

Here is an example of an interview on the 2008 Olympics athletes uniform. The interview is posted using Media Player.

These videos tend to be long, from 1/2 hour to one hour long.

Although the size of the video (1/2 an hour or 30 seconds) is no longer an issue in today's web technology, it is still always important to keep the size down to a bare minimum. The larger (the longer) the video, the more space you will need to store it. And why use up space unnecessarily.

So, like everything else about websites, editing is a very important step to keep your own website functioning well. The smaller the video size the better. Of course, that doesn't mean affecting the quality of your video. If a 1/2-hour is really necessary, then keep the video that long.

There are many ways to install video into your website; Real video, Media Player, Youtube and Flash Video are some of the options.

To decide on which one to use, it is best to discuss the options with your website designer.