How to Choose and Create Videos for your Website

Videos Overview

Most websites rely heavily on media to get their message across and entice visitors, especially restaurant websites. Adding a video to your site can add personality, uniqueness and showcase delicious dishes, but sometimes choosing and preparing a video for your website can be challenging with the range of video hosting platforms, styles, orientations and more. We're here to help you! 

Why are videos good for your website? 

Videos are eye catching and grab the attention of visitors to the site better on average than images. Studies show that more than 80% of visitors to your website will only see the first slide of a hero slideshow, but will generally stay longer when they see a video, so there's more opportunity to show off more of what you have to offer.

Video Hosting

The first challenge most people will encounter when looking to add videos to their website is which hosting platform to choose. There are 100’s of options out there, but rest assured, there is one that performs best on BentoBox websites - Vimeo! While YouTube is the most popular choice, there are some significant accessibility issues with embedded YouTube videos including:

• Title - videos need a title attribute that screen readers can detect in the case of visually impaired users, YouTube videos are only able to have a title added when they are added via iframe manually

• Accessibility controls - Again YouTube videos need to have accessibility controls manually added via iframe code which is not an option in the hero

• Video suggestions - YouTube videos will end with a panel of links to other suggested videos, even when embedded as an iframe, which is a huge ADA no-no

• Autoplay - YouTube’s autoplay feature is not ADA complaint due to incompatibility with screen readers and other devices for visually impaired users 

For these reasons and others, we highly recommend using Vimeo as your video hosting platform for videos on your BentoBox website.

How to Choose a Video for your website. 

When it comes to creating or choosing a video for your website there are several factors to consider. High quality videos are always important, but it can be equally important to consider the orientation, length and subject matter of the video.

Video Aspect Ratio

Typically we recommend a standard 16:9 aspect ratio for all video added to your website. While other video alignments can work well with certain styles and design, 16:9 is the safest and most universally compatible format.

Video Orientation

We never recommend using mobile-oriented (portrait) videos, as they will not work well at all on desktop, and editing the buffer-spaces in for them to display fully on desktop is high lift and usually looks bad.

Video Length

There is no specific length that is ideal for a video on your website, but we do have some guidelines that could prove helpful. For videos in the hero section of a site, most data suggests that the average user only spends about 3-5 seconds looking at that section of the site, so it's important that your video is not too long - we recommend no more than 30 seconds - and gets to the good, attention grabbing part fast, make the most of those 3-5 seconds!

Video Subject Matter 

It’s important to match the vibe and subject matter of your video to that of your website - but what exactly does this mean? For example, if your branding is all greens and blues, it would be best to choose a video with a similar color present, or at least make sure the people in the video (if applicable) aren’t all wearing red as this could be confusing to users and take away from the aesthetic of your site. Another thing to consider is the ‘vibes’ of the video. Does your video show people having a good time and laughing at your restaurant? If so, is that the vibe you want to convey with your concept and brand? Remember: You’re not designing your site for you, you're designing it for your customers. 

Generally the best options for a hero video are close ups of food/preparation of food, background activity of a restaurant/kitchen or other subject matter where the content is still digestible/preserved if the video is cropped off on the sides. Videos focussing on individual people or interactions may not display well on mobile.

Why doesn’t BentoBox host or upload videos? 

This is a very common question we get, using platforms like Vimeo can be complicated and feel like extra steps in an already arduous process, however there are many benefits to hosting Videos externally and embedding them 

• Video File size and Page speed - Generally video files, especially those that meet current high-def standards, are very large. Having to fully load and render a large video file every time someone visits your site will cause site performance to suffer and slow down the load times to the point of losing more visitors than the video gains you.

We host video via Vimeo primarily, so Vimeo does the work of loading and rendering the video completely separately from the loading of your website leading to no penalty to load times or performance.. 

• File type issues - Video files come in many many different formats, not all are compatible with all browsers, devices, or operating systems. Embedded video have no file format and are compatible with all browsers and devices

• Editing - If you need to edit the video added to your site for any reason that can be done easily with an embedded video. Oftentimes you won't even need to adjust the embed URL, just re-upload the video to Vimeo.

Creating a video for your site 

• Customer making it themselves (recording) - We always recommend recording a video at the highest possible quality you are capable of, but these days most smart phones have good enough cameras to record a video for your website no problem.

• Professional Video Creation - There are many service providers who offer video creation for your business or website. We recommend following the specs outlined above for the best results

  • 16:9 aspect ratio 

  • No longer than 30 seconds, with the most relevant information in the first 5 

  • Landscape orientation 

  • Hosted on Vimeo

  • Video creation service providers will be able to advise on subject matter typically.