Getting web video working on our Squarespace site - Part 1.

A couple of weeks ago we moved our Philadelphia wedding videography site, to Squarespace a managed hosting and content management system company. While Squarespace has a lot of advantages, it doesn't provide much support for a video intensive site like Bonnie Blink Productions. They have a 20mb upload limit which effectively prevents us from putting any video over a couple of minutes directly on Squarespace. To work around this I employed two methods. One was to upload our shorter videos (under 10 minutes) to ExposureRoom. ExposureRoom is a site optimized for content creators. The quality of their Flash video is quite good and they transcode each video in three sizes (small, medium, and HD). Code for embedding video on your site is provided as well as thumbnails.

There was still the problem of the longer videos (up to 40 minutes). I would need to put them somewhere. Fortunately I still had my account at Dreamhost where the Bonnie Blink Productions website has been for the past six years. Since they have almost unlimited storage and high bandwidth limits, there would no issue with storing and streaming the content from there. Since the www.bonnie-blink.com domain had be pointed to Squarespace, I couldn't reference any content still at Dreamhost. We also own www.bonnieblink.com and www.bonnieblinkproductions.com. These have always redirected to www.bonnie-blink.com. What I did was to make www.bonnieblinkproductions.com a fully hosted domain. Now all the longer videos will be at that URL.

The next step was to set the video up on the Squarespace site. More on that in the next installment.

Website changes at Bonnie-Blink.com

We have made some major changes to the look of the website for Bonnie Blink Productions, our Philadelphia wedding videography company. Some of these were performance driven. The old design took too long to load and didn't display well on smaller screens. Our redesign is much faster, less resource hungry, and (in my opinion) a lot nicer looking. Another move that we made was to move the site to Squarespace, a managed web hosting company in New York. Not has performance improved, but Squarespace's excellent online content management system allowed us to redesign the site in record time. What is really neat is how you can make formatting changes on the fly. There was still some manual customization to be done, but it was easy to add Javascript and CSS to the site where needed. Using Squarespace doesn't offer as many options to tweak things as self-hosting, but it is much easier to maintain.