Add Pics to Your Web Pages

Learn how to add a range of media to your site – and avoid some pitfalls.

- Gary Marshall

The internet may have started its life as a text-only medium, but today it’s capable of all kinds of wonders - and that means you aren’t limited to mere words to get your message across. You can add photos or videos, music or maps – the range of available content to make your site sing is truly massive. Last issue you discovered how to make words that work for your website. This time you’ll find out how to supplement those words to make your site a multimedia marvel.

We’ll look at two kinds of content. The first is content you provide, such as the images you use to illustrate your site’s pages. The second is content you embed from another site. Here, we use a map from Google Maps, yet you can embed all kinds of things: Twitter feeds, Facebook videos, YouTube clips, SoundCloud and Bandcamp music, and much more.

The big advantage of embedding content is that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We’re sure you’re perfectly capable of making a wonderful map, but why bother when Google has already done the work for you, and when it can also offer your visitors live traffic info, satellite views, driving directions and locations of nearby points of interest?

Scratch my back…

Embedding content is particularly useful when somebody else owns the copyright. Upload an Adele video to your site and you’ll receive a nastygram from her record company for copyright infringement. Embed the official clip from YouTube or Vevo and the company will be delighted; you get the video and it gets details of the number of views, what platforms were used to access the video, and so on. It’s a win-win situation, with free content for your site and useful data for the company.