Publishing video or audio
You can make video or audio files available easily and cheaply on the web. They are files that can be downloaded with a simple click, just like a PDF or a Word document. Users will have to have (free) software on their PCs that can read the downloaded files.
Publishing recordings of events, conferences or talks for people to later download can significantly extend the impact of an event – assuming you also promote the event etc and let people know about the online availability.
Most web CMS will allow you to ‘upload’ a file from your hard disk and make it available at the click of a mouse on a web page. If you have a static site this will involve a small bit of programming.
Creating a video or audio file is not technically hard – digital cameras and audio recorders have made digital recording as easy as pressing a button.
Before you publish large files like videos to the web you may need to have them web-’optimised’. This means reducing the quality and file size to the minimum standard necessary for good web display, with the key benefit of reducing the time and bandwidth needed to download them. You’ll need special editing software like Quicktime
or Adobe Premier to do this.
A special type of publishing of audio files to the internet to make the files more widely available is podcasting.
Tip
Publishing event photos at low cost
Photos online can provide a useful record of events such as launches, conferences or special meetings. It can also help to attract visitors to your website, exposing them to other material on the site.
Individual photos will normally be easy to add to your own site. But large collections, such as from a conference, may take significant time and effort to publish.
A number of specialist websites exist solely for the purpose of publishing collections of photos. These commercial services typically offer easy-to-use online tools for free (if you can put up with advertising) or for a modest rental fee if you can’t. You can simply provide a link from your site to the photo pages you have prepared.
Hosting costs will be somewhere between $30 and a few hundred dollars a year, depending on the number of photos, and you will need to upload digital photos from a PC to the photo website.
Examples of such sites are http://www.flickr.com/ , http://www.pbase.com/ , http://www.photosite.com/ or http://www.smugmug.com