Writing a blog has always been a great way to reach out to your community. Blogs however, do not have to be a completely one-dimensional medium. Have you ever thought about posting a video as part of your blog or just wanted to share a great video with your community? If you have not, then you have an opportunity to improve your communications with your church members. A Vlog (Video Blog), can bring your online presence to a whole new level. If you’re looking to drive more traffic to your website or just build a great rapport within your church or community, then you should take the time to find the right video app for your website.

Maybe your aim is not to attract more traffic to your website, but to engage more with your current members. If you enjoy writing a blog, there are apps out there which will allow you to create videos to be posted as part of your website blog. If you built your website using a CMS package such as WordPress then this is very simple, just search for a plugin that best suits your needs. Most CMSD products will allow for uploading an existing YouTube video or even a video from your own computer. Other useful video plug-ins include: MediaElement.js, VideoJS, Spider Video Player, and HTML5 Video Gallery & Player.

For those of you who don’t use WordPress for your website there are other video application options. For example, Hana FLV Player is one video app that would work with almost any style of website. Drupal and Joomla are other popular website builders in which you may have chosen. If you use Drupal you should check out OpenChurch for adding 3rd party video from YouTube and Vimeo. As for working with Joomla, another great extension to add would be AllVideos. The AllVideos application uses descriptive plugin tags to get rid of copying and pasting huge blocks of HTML code.

For full enterprise video hosting, ustudio has created a video platform that is very extensive. Again, it really depends on what your goal is with posting video content to your website. On a large scale, ustudio can help you distribute your videos to all other social media platforms like Youtube, Roku, Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo and more very easily.

Of course church media can be delivered to your audience however you like – audio, video, emails, etc. Video content can be much more engaging for viewers whether or not you have a daily blog or occasionally post updates about events. Getting onboard with a video application that makes managing your content as easy as writing a blog is the goal. No one wants to pour hours into trying to get video content onto their website. So take a look at some of the video apps we had mentioned above and good luck with adding a video section for your church website!