Can I incorporate a background video on my home page?

We like to think of a background video as adding the impact factor! 

When the user arrives on the homepage of your website, a background video plays automatically so it’s the first thing they see and captures their attention. Most importantly, it helps make their visit more memorable and you want to be the site they remember and come back to! 

The best news is that we don’t charge to add a background video to your site (at any point in the project lifespan)! 

The subject / topic of the background video could be anything really, from drone footage over the local area or points of interest, footage of your busy office with the team throughout, a couple doing salsa in their kitchen, a dog running round the local park - the possibilities are endless! Whatever your comfortable with and what you know will resonate with people visiting your website!

We have a number of projects that utilise a background video on the home page. Some good examples (at the time of writing) are:

• Turner Properties
• Cooper Adams
• Benjamin Stevens
• Mark Beaumont
• O’Connell Property Agents
• Livin Estate Agents
• Moving Works

Things to bear in mind;

1. You can either create your own custom video or use stock video from iStockPhoto (for example). You could even combine the two to make the perfect video to showcase your business! 
2. A standard web-optimised stock video would generally cost around £40 so it’s a bit of a quick win that’s worth bearing in mind. 
3. In terms of length, the video needs to be less than 1 minute - a good length is around 30-40 seconds.
4. The file needs to be web-optimised (i.e. as small file size as possible) so it doesn't affect the page load speed too much. You can also host the video on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo as well. 
5. The desktop version should be in the ratio of 16:9 or 4:3 (1080). If you want the background video to be shown on the mobile version too, then of course, we'll need a 2nd version of the video which needs to be in portrait format. 
6. Do not include sound, logos/branding or text. 
7. If you're using a video sharing platform like YouTube or Vimeo then you’d just need to send us the link to embed; however, if you're sending us the video file to host on our side, use WeTransfer.
8. On some of our projects, we’ve incorporated time-sensitive background videos so for example, in the morning, you’d see one video, in the afternoon you’d see a different video and then a different video again for the evening - and that’s all automated. It’s just a nice addition that people will notice if visiting more than once.