OK, who here hasn’t heard of YouTube? Come on, there must be someone? No?! Well what did I expect! The truth is, YouTube, and a whole range of other less well known video websites have been an Internet phenomenon of the last couple of years. We’ve all been emailed a link to a funny clip, or watched a ‘best bit’ from a television programme on there.

And an enterprising few of you have probably had a go at uploading a video yourself. Whether you’ve recorded something from the television, or added a clip from your own camera or camera phone, the process of getting short movies onto YouTube is very easy.

Thanks to the clever thinking of a few people, the power of television now exists on a website.

But did you know that you can have exactly the same videos that you see on YouTube, embedded into your webeden.co.uk website?

We’ve made it really easy. To get a YouTube video onto your webeden.co.uk website, just go to the ‘Insert’ Menu, and choose ‘Insert Object’. At the top of the list you can choose ‘Video – YouTube’. Use the editor button to link to the YouTube URL of the video. (The URL of the video can be found to the right of the video on YouTube.) Once you’ve got the video onto your webeden.co.uk website, you can drag and drop it anywhere you like, just like a normal image. You can set the video to Autoplay, hide away the controls, keep the aspect ratio when you’re resizing it, and so much more.

This feature is available on all our packages, even the free website builder!

But why would you want to put a video on your website? Well, for exactly the same reason that you yourself have watched a video on YouTube. Lets face it, we all find short movies entertaining – we’re so used to reading text on a website, it provides an exciting break from the norm. So if you want to engage the visitors to your website, and get them to stay on your website longer, then its a great idea to add a YouTube video clip.

What should be in your video? Well, ultimately you need to add something that’s relevant to your website. If you’re selling products, then what about a video demonstration of the product being used? If you’ve got a hotel then show short videos of the rooms, or the views.

Reasearch has been shown that where video exists alongside a product, sales of that product go up.

Have any of you already added some video to your website? Leave us a message below with a link to your website, and we can showcase it as an example – and let other people learn from your YouTube skills!

27.1.09 Update. If you want to find out how to add YouTube videos to your own website, then watch our how to add YouTube Video tutorial now!