A video background has been the single most requested feature for our Maranatha church WordPress theme. I’m happy to tell you that this feature is finished and ready for you to add to your church website.
Video Background Demo
We updated the theme’s demo to show you the video background in action. You can use any video of your choosing and adjust the and opacity/color to suit your taste. We’ve written a guide to help you find and prepare a video clip for use on your church’s Maranatha-powered homepage.
Add Your Video Background
- Update the Maranatha theme to version 1.4 to begin using the new video background feature. Go to Dashboard > Updates to do this.
- Follow the instructions in Maranatha’s Video Background Guide to find, prepare and insert a video into the background of your homepage.
Show Us What You’ve Done
We’d really love to see what you do with Maranatha’s new video background feature. Please share your church’s website URL in the comments below.
11 Comments
Thanks for adding this feature. I have added a video to the first section of our church homepage https://ibf.church/, and a still frame from the same video as background image for mobile viewers.
You’re very welcome. Thanks for using it and for sharing your homepage. I am enjoying the clouds pass by… That’s a good video. It’s nice and subtle. More interesting than an image but not distracting at all. That’s the idea!
Fred, great execution! It’s given me a lot of ideas, thanks for sharing. (Oh, and by the way, at the bottom of your home page the Twitter icon redirects to a LinkedIn “page not found”. THought you might want to know!)
Thanks, Daniel, for pointing that out. It looks like our LinkedIn and Twitter URLs blended into one because of a missing line break. I fixed that now and it now shows both social icons.
Speaking of social icons—it’s been some time now since Google Plus has updated their icon. When might we see that new icon within Maranatha? Foursquare isn’t really using that checkmark icon anymore either, and the Facebook “f” isn’t quite right either.
Our themes use Elusive Icons (http://elusiveicons.com/icons/) so we’ve been waiting for an update. Icon requests are here: https://github.com/ReduxFramework/Elusive-Icons/issues
They released a big update a couple years ago but nothing since then so if the project ends up being defunct we’ll have to switch to another icon font. I’ll note this so we can check up on it again in 2017. Thanks for pointing these things out.
Thanks for the info. If a switch is under consideration, I hear that Font Awesome (http://fontawesome.io/) is a popular choice with their 675 icons including nearly every social network logo. They also appear to keep up to date.
You’re right, Fred. Several years ago we considered FontAwesome but found Elusive Icons to be a better choice. It looks like FontAwesome has the lead now. Thank you for putting it back on my radar.
This is a great feature for Marantha, thanks Steven! I’ve just added a video background to http://www.trinitycity.church/.
For your information, I initially had the video file hosted on Backblaze B2, and the final frame of the video stuck on the screen for about half a second every time before looping. Then I tried uploading the video in WordPress, and the loop works seamlessly that way.
That looks really great! Thanks for sharing.
Looks great, James. It’s nice how you used a video clip of an actual service rather than a stock video. Also the blurred images in the other sections nicely fit in and don’t distract from the foreground text. Also, congrats on securing your .church domain!
Thanks Fred!
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