Over the past few years we’ve seen a big transition to big vibrant images and videos used dominantly in terms of web design.
Web design is all about telling a story to your visitors and helping convey the right message to them as they browse your site. There is little argument that a great and well thought laid out website will leave no stone unturned trying to connect with it’s visitors. The same could be said for any form of marketing but the difference with a website is user interaction. What better way to interact or tell a story then through video.
With so much video being produced every day and modern internet users preferring them over plain text and images, incorporating a video into your website can go a long way to bring it to life. Like any design trend there are pros and cons but with broadband becoming widespread and video compression as great as it is, the days of worrying about bandwidth and loading times are all but long and forgotten.
Let’s take a little deeper look shall we.
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The Beginning
Video backgrounds came into the public spotlight not to long ago. Popularity spiked in the year of 2013 and have been in vogue ever since. We’re all familiar with using YouTube and other video sites in our day to day blogs and content marketing strategies but in terms of design nothing looks more impressive then a video background. That being said it can make your overall design impressive beyond compare or if poorly used, can ruin the experience of even the best web design.
The biggest benefit to using one is the visual presentation it provides in a matter that appears unobtrusive to the user. Videos make it easier to tell stories that sometimes can’t quite be conveyed by static text content. This helps add to the overall visual experience of your website as well as impressing your visitors upon first arrival.
There’s no limit or specific type of website that can’t use such a style. We’ve seen some great designs on business, ecommerce, and of course agency websites. In this day and age, big is beautiful.
Some Warnings
Like examining fine art a large video background on your website isn’t going to appease everyone. The great thing about art and design is we all have different tastes, needless to say not everyone is going to be happy about it. With websites like blogs, news, or magazines having a large video background will kill the user experience you could have had.
Video backgrounds are meant for those who are looking for more user interaction. Those that need to convey a sense of enigma or those that are looking to portray a certain message will thrive with a related video playing.
As an SEO myself another thing to look out for is your page speed. Page speed is important in terms of ranking in Google and videos can be hard to load on slower internet connections. If you’re going the video route it’s important to make sure you’ve followed the proper norms for video compression and encoding. Of course be sure not to forget about the mobile aspect of your web design. The great thing about responsive websites is there ability to adapt to different screen sizes. Through this you could choose to leave out your video background all together for visitors from mobile devices.
Getting Started
The hardest part of it all is finding a video to use. If you have the budget you could of course hire a video production team to record but if you’re just looking to test it out then check out a new website I found called Coverr. A relatively new website Coverr had already got a small but decent selection available for free to download. Not to be outdone they claim to be promoting 7 new video backgrounds every Monday which should help grow their library quickly.
This is just one of the many websites I’ve found out there. As mentioned the great thing about Coverr right now is it’s free.
Wrapping Up
It’s easy to implement a video background in your website but it’s important to keep in mind what message or story you’re trying to tell with it. Video will drive user engagement when used properly and with the right message you should see an increase in interaction and website leads.
