How To Easily Create A Professional Video Website

The tools you need to easily create and launch a professional video website like YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix.

How To Easily Create A Professional Video Website

In this article we’ll give you the tools you need to easily create and launch a professional video website like YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix without the need for coding or advanced background with online video hosting. We’ll quickly walk through the steps need to get up and running and a few recommended templates and tools you can use to create your own video website.

Before getting started decide what type of video website you are going to build. Is this a video gallery or portal for a company? Are you planning on presenting corporate content? Or are you building a subscriber-based niche video experience like a Netflix or Hulu but for a specific topic or type of content? Determining the use case will dictate the content management system (CMS) framework, video hosting, and authentication layers needed.

For example, if you are planning on building a video website for a company and presenting customer stories, product videos, and other corporate content you can do this easily by using free video hosting like YouTube or Vimeo. For more sensitive copyright controlled content you will definitely need to use a premium online video platform. For this example let’s create a new lifestyle video site and we want it to take on the look of Netflix with easy navigation and mobile responsiveness.

Ingredients needed to create the video website:

  • A domain name – you can get this from hosting providers like GoDaddy and Network Solutions.
  • WordPress hosting (we recommend WPEngine, but there are also others) – to create and manage your video site, you need to launch and maintain an instance of WordPress. Don’t be alarmed this is actually really easy and can be cost affordable.
  • Premium WordPress theme designed for video – there are a number of options available, we’ll outline them below. For this example we’ll use VideoBox.
  • Video hosting platform – depending on the content type we recommend YouTube or a premium video platform.

Best templates for creating video websites:

  • VideoBox (get it) – can be used to create a range of different video-based websites. VideoBox includes a popular videos feed surfacing more of your best content, a widgetized homepage that makes it easy for you to rearrange the homepage modules in the best way for your project, a video carousel widget for quickly creating slideshows, and a good amount of customization settings and controls. 
  • Vlog (get it) – makes it easy to choose the perfect layout for your video content each time you add a new video to your site. Vlog automatically detects and creates video thumbnails and publishes them on your site, with no extra effort required on your part. 
  • VideoPro (get it) – has a framework that mirrors the looks of YouTube and includes an extensive navigation menu and block-style posts with plenty of embedded information included. 

Directions on how to build:

  1. Purchase a domain name to be used as the primary location of your video website.
  2. Create an account and purchase WordPress hosting via WPEngine.
  3. Launch a new WordPress instance in your WPEngine account.
  4. Purchase one of the themes above, in our case we’ll use VideoBox.
  5. Install the theme with the sample data in your new WordPress instance.
  6. Locate your video content, whether be on YouTube or in your premium video hosting platform.
  7. Set your branding and layout configuration of your new theme.
  8. Start syncing videos by either embedding players from your online video platform or YouTube.
  9. Configure categories and metadata tied to the videos you just uploaded.
  10. Connect your domain name to your WPEngine hosted WordPress website and go live!

If you followed the above steps you should now have a fully functional video destination website. Stay tuned to future articles with more examples of video website templates and themes.

50Wheel is the world's leading website for video strategy and marketing technologies. Browse hundreds of software tools, guides and get strategy advice.

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