Use Video Content to Enhance Your Front Page

There are different ways to introduce and promote yourself, your brand, or your business on your front page. Have you considered adding video to the mix? These three examples show how you can enhance your homepage and grab your reader’s attention with video content.

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Introduce yourself to the world

The website of The Malpass Brothers promotes the “classic, real country” music of siblings Taylor and Christopher Malpass from North Carolina. Their front page includes the essentials: photos, a message from Christopher about who they are, news about their documentary in the works, and a form to sign up for their mailing list.

The embedded video at the top is hard to miss: it’s an effective introduction to the duo and their music, and shows how a video clip can enrich a visit to a site in a way that text and images simply can’t.

You can embed videos hosted on many other services onto your site for free, as shown above. To display a video from your Vimeo account on a static front page, for example, copy the video’s URL from your web browser’s address bar while viewing it on Vimeo, then paste the URL on a line by itself in your page editor.

Another alternative is inserting a Vimeo shortcode into a Custom HTML Widget and displaying a smaller video in your sidebar or footer.

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Show movement in your featured header

Some themes support video in their headers, like Swell, as seen on the fashion site Alyssa Nicole. Similarly, Tara Reed — who builds software without writing code — uses premium theme Carmack for her Apps Without Code blog. She displays a flash of video in her featured post slider.

Here, Tara promotes the video of her TedXDetroit talk, and the movement from the video grabs your attention as you browse her front page.

This year’s free default WordPress theme, Twenty Seventeen, also supports video headers.

Browse the selection of other themes that support video in the header or featured content area. Each theme is different, so refer to the theme’s support page and demo site to see it in action.

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Add a fun clip that appeals to a wide audience

Formed in 2003 at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, Break of Reality is a four-person, alt-classical chamber ensemble whose cello rock sound is loved by listeners around the world. Using the Full Frame theme, the band displays a scrolling front page of full-width images, primarily from past performances.

At the bottom, they embed their wildly popular YouTube video of their rendition of the Game of Thrones theme song, viewed more than 17 million times (and counting). It’s a great way to appeal to brand-new listeners and visitors who stumble upon their site.

Similar to Vimeo, embedding a video from YouTube requires copying the video’s URL, then pasting it on its own line into your page editor. You can also embed the video with a shortcode or customize some of the video’s settings.

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