HOW TO: Add Multimedia to Your Blog

HOW TO: Add Multimedia to Your Blog This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. A website without multimedia is like a cupcake without icing: Functional but lacking. These days, all manner of web pages from huge company sites to small business blogs are expected to add audio, photo, or video to their posts and homepages. While this all sounds well and good for multimedia companies that produce endless amounts of content, small businesses with text-based websites can run into trouble finding and providing appropriate content. The real trick is adding multimedia that enriches your site, product, or brand without taking away from your company's core message and aesthetic. And how do you get a rich multimedia experience without hiring a coder? This is rarely easy. To help, we've collected some simple resources to add audio, photo or video to your blog. The Basics For most blog hosting sites, including WordPress and Tumblr, most multimedia is handled through embed codes. Don't worry, you don't need to know HTML; you just need to know where the button for viewing and editing HTML on your blog post is. All embeds can be handled as simple copy-and-paste jobs using these resources. WordPress, Tumblr and any other half-decent blog host will have ways to add multimedia in their dashboard. Some of these are better than others. Tumblr tools are pretty intuitive whereas WordPress sometimes glitches when switching between HTML and visual formats. To save you all sorts of headaches, the following resources work off embed codes. This means you can see and edit all your multimedia visually, then copy-and-paste the final code into your post as HTML. Simple as that. READ MORE: http://mashable.com/2010/07/28/add-multimedia-to-blog/