Will I be able to blog on my new site?
Yes. WordPress software gets installed on your host so by default it is a blog. However, unlike most blogs you see out there, this one uses more advanced features of WordPress, making the front page a landing page and places the blog under a menu selection–so it looks like the blog is just part of your site, giving you more of a web “presence.”
How hard will it be to maintain my new site?
In many ways, since your new site is based on WordPress, it’s like using a word processor for web content. So you can actually change the content on your site very easily without having to wait for a designer or programmer.
However, because it does use advanced features of WordPress, such as menus, static front page, plugins, etc., you must be cognizant of your sites structure and where information displayed on the page comes from. It can be a bit confusing at first, but you’ll figure it out once you look around a bit and maintain your content.
How do I host videos on my site?
Video content is big and tends to take a lot of band width. Our puny little hosting accounts don’t handle that kind of volume very well–although it can work OK for low volume, blog-oriented tips and stuff. In fact, most hosts put a limit on the size of a video you can upload to your blog to around 10MB, which isn’t much at all. There are ways around that, but it’s kind-of a pain to implement–back door FTP uploads, etc.
Therefore, if you can use a service like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, UStream, that’s the best–then just embed it in your blog (or page) to show it there, but let them do the actual hosting of it. If you need to keep your videos private and secure (as in “for sale”), you can do a little of that on your blog by FTP’ing it and linking to it if the videos are small or not accessed much. But highly-used videos need to be hosted on “cloud” storage–something like Amazon’s S3.
To actually show a YouTube video, for example, on your site, you would copy the ’embed code’ from the sidebar on YouTube and paste it into your blog post or page using the HTML tab in the editor. That’s all there is to it!
For a video hosted on your own blog, upload the video to your “media library” with the WordPress dashboard (“Media–>Add New”). Then in your post or page, click the “Add Video” button. That’s it.
How do I secure my videos so only buyers can view them?
Securing “for sale” videos can be accomplished by setting the download page “Visibility” (on the right-hand side bar) to “Password Protected” and giving it a password. The unfortunate thing is that you can only give it one password–everyone has to use the same one.
Oftentimes, I prefer to use “security by obfuscation” and not have to hassle with the passwords. By not having the download pages indexed by search engines and not having them show up in the site search, only people that receive a link to the page will know how to get there. And you can name the page obtusely so people can’t just guess.
Either way, you do need to do some fancy footwork to NOT have the search engines index that secret page and to NOT have it show up in your own blog search. It’s important to have the correct plugins installed and know how to use them to accomplish this.
Does video have to be of certain quality?
The short answer is “it depends.” Sites like YouTube will process a video and produce output of various resolutions. But in order for YouTube to produce HD video, the initial quality has to be there.
For videos that are available for sale (and download) on your site, it’s a good idea to have them of higher quality to keep the value proposition up. That being said, it IS about the value of the video. Content is more important that quality. But quality plays a role.
Videos embedded in posts (blog entries) and pages can be of lower quality.
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