You can use a site like Fiverr or Upwork to get professional support for this, or you can try to cut something together yourself using an app like Splice. If you want to use a video background, a custom video is definitely the better option. So, you’ve decided that a video background is the best option for your site – what’s next?įirst of all, you need a video to use as your background. Here are just a few examples of sites that unapologetically – and effectively – use color backgrounds: What you want users to focus on when they land on your site.If you choose a color background, you need to think about: Plain backgrounds are very lightweight, meaning your site should load nice and quickly. Sure, you see them used on a lot of websites, but there’s a reason for that!Ĭolor backgrounds help users focus on your content, rather than distracting them with lots of patterns, images, or movement. We’re not saying you should definitely use a color background, only that you shouldn’t discount it straight away just because it seems a little boring. Always think about your user experience first when making design decisions. Seeking out a video, image, or illustrated background just because you want to jazz up your site may not be the right move. We use a plain background on our own homepage to help visitors focus on the important stuff – our text, calls to action, and menu, for example. Here are some examples of sites that use illustration backgrounds particularly well: Load quickly and have lightweight file sizes.Are consistent in style across your whole site.If you’re going to use illustrations, you need to make sure they: Instead of boring stock imagery, you’ll have unique, memorable graphics to convey your brand identity. They’re more lightweight than image and video files, meaning your website should load faster, and they’re also custom made meaning that they can elevate your brand. The good news is that illustrations have a lot of positives. This means that creating on-brand, high-quality illustrations for your website is a much more expensive and time-consuming process than using images or video. The main problem with illustrations is you can’t really create them yourself unless you’re a professional designer – while most people can take professional photos, illustration is a much harder skill to master. This means illustrations work especially well in tech and service industries! Illustration backgrounds are perfect if you have an abstract product or service, because you can take intangible topics and turn them into illustrations – it’s a more forgiving and free medium than video or photography. Usually require hiring someone else to provide and maintain the illustrations Great for industries with abstract products or services Very unique and versatile from a branding perspective The Fiit website, which we’ll take a look at next, has a gorgeous video background on its homepage – but look at the cost to its sitespeed: If you embed them via a third party site like Wistia or YouTube, you can sidestep a lot of this problem, provided you turn autoplay off. they take up a lot of storage space, and a lot of effort to load). Video backgrounds are notoriously bad for site speed. Site speed is one of the main factors Google analyzes when determining how highly to rank your site for its relevant keywords, so a slow site can seriously harm your SEO. When you’re accessing a site through your mobile and on the go, the audio of an autoplaying video can be surprising and embarrassing, or the site may struggle to load the video with a dodgy signal, leaving a big blank space on the page. This is largely down to how browsing habits have changed. As part of this work, we often ask around to find web design ‘pet peeves,’ and autoplaying video backgrounds comes up time and time again as something to avoid. We write a lot about web design principles what to avoid, and what works well. Why Video Backgrounds Have Fallen Out of Favor In fact, when we analyzed 27,000 websites, we found only around one in 200 used a video background. They were hugely popular five or 10 years ago, but you actually won’t find many sites using them nowadays. Video is a huge deal right now, but video backgrounds? Not so much. ‘That’s sure to impress our new customers.’ ‘Let’s make the homepage a video,’ you may be thinking. You’re building a website you’re passionate about, and you want it to hold attention. Good for fitness websites due to focus on movementīad for performance (and therefore bad for SEO, too)
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