In my mind video was entertainment; music videos which I do not find interesting or useful. However, recently, I read some articles which made me realize web video could also be an effective teaching and educational tool. Thinking about our websites from that perspective pointed out a lot of places where web video might be a valuable addition.
For example, we use WordPress as the foundation for many of our sites. While it is easy to use, for a software package, computer novices have trouble with it. In addition, the nuances of some of the features are subtile and confusing at first.
WordPress includes Posts, Pages, and Tags. Understanding the difference between these is essential to make your website work the way it should. However, the differences are not obvious.
The geek answer is these three are indexes into the database and can be used any way you like. A less technical answer is that pages are where you put content that is independent of elapsed time. For example, your organizational chart, your biography, the purpose of your site, etc. Posts are for things that are evolving. For example, this post is, in effect, an update to our "services we provide" page. Tags provide yet another way to help a visitor quickly find what they are looking for.
What does this have to do with web video? It takes a lot of words to explain all that and no matter how you labor over the words, many will not follow. The idea of making a video from screen shots of actually writing a post while I talk about what I am doing and show how I do it is attractive. I think a 3-5 minute video would do more good than a lengthy written description.
There are many other areas where we think a short video might educate and inform better than written text. The one snake in the grass is the search engines are all text based and really can't do much with video. If I write a 500 word description of how to write a post, it will all get indexed and my website ranking will reflect the additonal content. If I do a bunch of videos my site may have increased traffic and more happy visitors, but the search engines won't give me credit. It makes something of a problem to decide what is the best balance.
