The first step to making your own video site is to capture some good video. Video that is suitable for the Web is different from conventional video. For example, you should shoot video in short clips and make sure that you use compression to ensure the video is small enough for upload and viewing on the Web. Check out some good tips on shooting video for the web over here.

Learn to make your own video site

The second step for making your own video site is to select a good web host. the importance of a good web host cannot be overemphasized. I've seen some web hosts which are very unstable, resulting in system crashes or outages. If you're looking for some good sites to host your video, consider a rock solid web host like this one which I use.

You know that video which you captured off your camcorder into your computer? Well, to view it on the web, you can't just upload a 100 MB video file into your web host. That's way too large. What you need to do is to compress the video into a format that's compact enough for upload and for streaming over the web, just like those videos you see on YouTube.

Typically, the video files streaming over YouTube are Flash files, so you got to convert your video (e.g. AVI) files into Flash (SWF) files. Here's a good tool for doing this kind of conversion.

Once the video has been converted to a web-friendly format, the next step in making your own video site is to upload the video. If you're using a domain of your own, you'll need an FTP program to upload the files onto the site. The procedure for doing this usually requires you to specify the FTP user name and password into your web site account.