WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

16

Adding Video and Audio

Video on your website is one of the most popular types of content for visitors these days, and WordPress offers a number of built-in options for including video. In this lesson, I help you sort through them, as well as the options for audio files.

For the greatest flexibility and ease of handling video files, particularly if you're going to have a lot of video on your site, I would recommend using one of the many WordPress plugins for video, and you can read about those in Lesson 37. If you're just going to have the occasional video, the choices offered in this lesson should be adequate.

UPLOADING/INSERTING VIDEO

Although there is an Add Video icon on the Upload/Insert menu of posts and pages, it's rare that you'll want to use it. That's because it simply creates a text link to the video file (whether it's uploaded to your site or is from a video-sharing site like YouTube), and that's just not very useful to your visitors.

However, let me quickly cover this method of putting video in your posts, just in case you ever need it. Video is the second icon from the left on the Upload/Insert menu. Clicking it brings up a window that looks exactly like the one for images. The From Computer tab is always the default so I'll begin with that.

Click the Select Files button and, in the popup window, locate your video file on your computer. When you're done, click Select and the file begins to upload, with the regular progress bar. Video files can be quite large, so ...