iframes in plain English

Hello to you all I hope everybody is keeping well and striving for success as always

Today I thought I would begin to de- mistily the world of video embedding on websites, videos are now more crucial than ever before, so having them on your site is now seen as a must have, so if you are not sure how this is done then all will be explained here

So lets begin with this

What are iframes -

iframes are HTML code that you copy and paste videos to display them on your site, the way most people do this, is on YouTube, as can be seen in the screen shot below.

Firstly then to be clear, it is perfectly OK to embed you tube videos on your site, that have been created by other people, because once a video is uploaded to you tube it becomes public property.

You tube is owned by Google and Google actually wants you to share videos on your site that's why there is a share and embed tab for you to do this

So how do iframes work then:

OK the best way to explain this, is by using, what are now becoming, my now famous and popular analogies,

Imagine You tube is a big room and people go in the room to watch videos, they can only access the room through one of the doors, of which there are many

So now I want you to imagine that there are little window frames in each door and so instead of going into the You tube room, you take a window from one of the doors and put it on your site, so this way people can watch the YouTube video from your site because you have put a window frame on you site to watch the video

So iframes work by allowing you to put a viewing window from your site, for your visitors to watch a you tube video from your site rather than clicking away from your site.

That is why it is called an iframe its like a window frame for another site being put onto your site, in this case You tube

So why is this important, well it is important to know that if you create your own video and try to put it directly on your site, you will be hosting the video on your server which will now slow your site down, because your site server is now streaming the video data and it really does not have enough bandwidth to cope with video data. I will create another blog soon on bandwidth

So if you upload your video to YouTube, then the you tube servers will host the video for you for free and you just embed the code on your website, so it does not slow your own website down.

So weather you are displaying your own video or someone else's, iframes are the perfect solution for this

A great little tip for you. If you look at the screen shot there are 3 dialogue boxes you can utilise, the top one is unchecked, if you do not want the list of other videos to be displayed at the end of the video, so they don't click away from your site to watch other videos

When you copy and paste the code from you tube, remember that you must paste the code in text view on your page or post

I hope, I have made iframes clear and simple for you, they are very useful

To all your success

Barry