Youtube is a free, Internet based service that displays videos under 10 minutes long. There are other sites that you can use to show videos, I'll show you how to use Youtube. Why do this? Imagine someone happens by your website and on the front page they see the minister saying something like: "Hi friend, I'm Rev. Sally and I want to extend to you a personal welcome to visit us this Sunday ... this Sunday, I'll be speaking about ..." Creating a new short welcome video each week is a very effective way to personalize the web experience.
If you don't want to start out with any videos, then just bypass this section. We can add them later.
There are lots of ways to take your video: your cell phone, your digital camera, the camera on your computer. But if you can afford $90 then I recommend buying an inexpensive "flip" camera. These are cameras that are designed to take Youtube quality video (which is low resolution, so it renders over the Internet quickly). The "Flip" brand is fine, but there are many low cost alternatives. I use one by Creative Labs, any of them will do as long as they say on the box something like "ready for Youtube."
Here's what you do:
- Login
- Upload the video by clicking "Upload video."
- Get the video displaying in Youtube and look to the right column to find the "Embed" box.
- You can customize things by clicking the star just to the right of the embed box, but I find the defaults work just fine.
- Copy the contents and place it in your email to me.
Here's one of my videos:
If you have more than 10 minutes then you can upload two or more videos and run them together as a playlist. Poke around and you'll see how to embed a playlist.
