Using Video As Your Website Background

Using A Video As Your Website Background

In Blogging, Video, Web by Brian Town

If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you know how important video AND a good website are to any successful business (or any business that wants to be successful). You know that it’s always a good idea to incorporate videos into your website, but how much is too much? What degree of visibility is just the right amount to impress any and all potential clients?

Having a demo reel or general video about your business on your homepage is great; it grabs, and hopefully keeps, peoples’ attention and gets them interested enough to learn more. But, that’s not what you want to do… You want to use that demo reel as the background of the page itself. You want to have that video about what you do play automatically, front and center, as soon as someone lands on your site.

Auto-play videos are a topic all their own, so we’ll cover that in a later post. Yay for planning ahead!

So that leaves background videos. Let’s cover the main things you need to consider when using a video as your website background:

  1. Content
    You don’t want to use just any video as the background. It wouldn’t make sense to use some random stock video to sell your business to people; if you’re going to have a video background, it needs to be something that is your own and is relevant to what you do.
  2. Ease of Viewing
    A video with people talking, music, sounds, or just a lot going on in general is way too busy to use as a background. If you use a complex video like this as the main focal point of your home page, as well as text, images, etc., people will be overwhelmed. They may only watch the video, the may mute their computer and only read the text, or they may leave your site all together.
  3. Audio
    The previous point led right to this one! It’s almost always best to just mute the audio on your background video to begin with, so you don’t run that risk of overwhelming your audience. You need to pick a video that lends well to this, because muting a testimonial won’t work out very well! A demo reel, however, is doable.
  4. Simplicity
    If you’ve got a paragraph of text explaining what you do and how you do it, images of products, links to social media and other pages, and so on, you might already have to much going on on your home page and adding a video would only make matters worse. So we’re back to overwhelming people…
    If you choose to use a video as your website background, the rest of the page needs to be simple. You want the page to be pleasing to the eye, easy to comprehend, and be simple to browse. If you pick the right video, it will set the tone for your business well enough on its own that you won’t need all the other fluff!

Using a video as your website background can either be a great choice or hurt your website overall, if you don’t design wisely. But, follow these tips and you’ll be good to go!

As always, reach out if there is anything that Michigan Creative can do for you! We would love to help build your Marketing Machine.

– Alli Myers