Mac SEO Blog

The newly released EverWeb version 4.2 for macOS and Windows includes two new features for EverWeb‘s Shape Options tab: Map Fill and Video Fill. These two new options give you more ways than ever in which you can integrate maps and videos in to your website. In this post, we will be looking at Video Fill. We will cover Map Fill in a later blog post.

Adding Video To Your Website’s Pages

EverWeb has a number of different ways in which you can add video to your website’s pages

1. As a Browser Background: Use the Inspector Window’s Page Settings-> Browser Background setting to set a video background for your page’s Browser Window
2. Using a dedicated widget. EverWeb has three dedicated video themed widgets: The Video widget can be used with MP4 files and for legacy video formats such as WebM and OGG files. The YouTube Widget is used with YouTube videos and the Vimeo Widget with Vimeo videos.
3. By embedding a video within the FlexBox Widget. The FlexBox widget is unique in that you can use it to embed a video within it.
4. The last way to add video to your website’s page is available if you are using EverWeb 4.2 or higher is by using Video Fill. You can use this option on most objects on your page. Alternatively, you can drag and drop a video directly from its source location, such as your computer desktop or the Cloud, on to your page. This will also create a Video Fill object.

In this post we will be looking at the last of these options, Video Fill, that was introduced in EverWeb 4.2.

Why Use Video Fill?

The new Video Fill feature can be applied to most objects, for example, a shape or TextBox. When used in this way, the object itself will become a video fill shape instead of its original object type. For example, if you add a shape in the form of a star to your page, then set the star shape to Video Fill using the Shape Options-> Fill option, the original star shape will be replaced with the video fill shape.

In this way, you have now more flexibility when adding video to your page. Also, the Video Fill options offer you a wider range of customization choices than those offered by EverWeb’s default widgets. You, therefore, have more options and choice on how to use video on your pages than ever before.

Using Shape Options’ Video Fill

As mentioned above, to use Video Fill, simply add an object to your page, such as a shape, or TextBox, then go to the Shape Options tab in the Inspector Window. Click on the Fill type dropdown menu and select Video Fill from the available options. The selected object will become a Video Fill object.

Alternatively, you can also drag and drop a video file from your hard disk, or Cloud location, on to your page and it will be automatically converted to a Video Fill object.

Video Fill’s Video Source

If you have added an object to the page, then converted it to a Video Fill object, the first thing you will need to do is to link the object to a video file. To do this, use the Video Source dropdown menu immediately below the Fill dropdown menu, You have four options to choose from:

• External Video URL
• Local Video File (i.e. a video file stored in the project file)
• YouTube Video File
• Vimeo Video File

Once you have chosen the Video source and linked it appropriately, you can then customize the Video Fill.

Customizing Your Video Fill

All of the Video Sources have the options to

• Loop the video,
• Auto Play the video,
• Mute the video,
• Show Video Controls
• Set the default volume level and
• Set the scroll speed of the video.

If you are using the External Video URL, or Local Video File as your Video Source, you have three additional options available. The first option enables you to scale you video to either ‘Scale to Fit’, ‘Scale to Fill’. ‘Stretch’ or use the video at its ‘Original Size’. Choose the option that is most appropriate to your video.

The second option is to add a Thumbnail to your video. This is like having a cover image for the video that the user has to click on in order to view the video. Using a thumbnail image is also useful if your video is large and takes time to load on the page.

The last additional option is ‘Pause other videos on play’ which does exactly what it says. This is a useful option to check when you have more than one video on your page.

EverWeb’s new Video Fill option makes adding videos to your pages easier, with more customizations options available than ever!