Online Marketing Tip

Hello again

If you've posted any videos on YouTube or maybe watched other people's you'll know you can usually get an 'embed code' to add the video to your own site or blog.

This is a great way to add useful content and a bit more visual interest to a plain website. We use quite a lot of videos on our site http://www.cinnamonedge.co.uk/ as well as on our blogs. You'll see if you decide to embed a video that you have a choice of sizes to fit most websites and uses.

But sometimes even the smallest available size is too wide for your site. Blogs almost always have two or sometimes three collumns and this means limitations on the width of any one collumn.

But you might not know that you can always reduce the size of a YouTube video by editing the embed code. The important thing is to keep the aspect ratio (proportions) of the video the same. So, if you reduce the width by, say, ten percent, you should reduce the height by the same percentage, rather than the same number of pixels. But as long as you're within a few pixels the video will still look okay.

Copy and paste the code in its original dimensions into the html of your site, then you need to edit it to size.

Edit the code in two places, where the code reads something like 'width="640" height=385"', which you'll find in the first line and the last line of the code, and of course the changes have to be the same in both lines. So now these might read 'width="460" height="275"' in both places. As I said, within a few pixels is fine. In the example I've quoted I reduced the video width by just over twenty-five percent and I've rounded the width to the nearest five pixels.

And here's what that looks like:

Roy