Last December, YouTube came out with a whole new redesign of their website that they slowly released to the public , from the viewer experience that changed their homepage and video view screen to the content creators layout of the profile page and widgets to use for better navigation. And as of last month, it has gone live for all users. This week we are going to be adding some of these features to our own YouTube channel, but we wanted to share with you today what all you, the content creator, can do with your profile. Tomorrow, we will share with you the changes we have been making.
- Better Design Presentation
Amazingly, YouTube now has a responsive design that can look great on a 17″ laptop browser or an iPhone browser. They have also set it up so that you can add custom channel art at the top of your page that will resize itself depending on the platform and make it continue to look great. (If you already have a great Google+ profile graphic, you are ahead of the game! Along with designs that work, they are now letting you link to 14 social media accounts with great buttons. - Channel Trailer
For visitors who have not subscribed to your channel and are visiting your YouTube profile page, you can create your own Channel Trailer to announce the purpose of the channel, what videos the viewer will find on it, and even some playlists they may want to check out right now. This will not only help with engagement, but hopefully improve your site’s structure and tie in a great vision for the future videos. - Sections
The Sections layout is new and allows you to organize your videos and playlists in the order you want to see them. If you use custom images for your videos, this can actually come off as a really cool design that quickly communicates what you are watching and may spur on more views for you. - Playlists
Playlists is actually not a new construct for YouTube as they have been around for quite awhile, but the way that YouTube has implemented them into the video player area is. Now when the viewer watches a video in a playlist, the rest of the videos in the playlist come up right next to the video, improving your other videos’ exposure and your brand.
For those that need more of a push to utilize the new design, here is a video from YouTube of all of the changes that they has been making:
[…] Yesterday we talked about all of the new features for your YouTube channel that you may not be utilizing. Today, we want to so show you the changes we have made to our own YouTube channel. Just from the experience of Monday, make sure that you put aside plenty of time to make new thumbnails, cover art, and a video trailer as even just 30 videos was time consuming. […]