I’ve never quite been a fan of channels on video sites, it just seems no one has even done them quite right. YouTube had come the closest, but their profile really just looked like glorified profiles and while the gave the user some customization, the resulting pages never look that great. If any video sharing site could change my opinion on channels, it was going to be Vimeo, and they have! Vimeo made their channels simple, dead simple, like, really really really simple.

Vimeo Channels give the user all of the customization and features they need. You can add your logo, you can change they colors, and you can add an remove little widgets that add things like RSS feeds and forums to your channel. Really you can do just about anything you could want, and no matter what you do the page will still look good and function well. Vimeo did something with their channels that more sites should think about, they limited how much the user can change the appearance. Sound bad at first right?

Well, consider for a moment all of those horrible Myspace pages. Really, have you honestly ever seen a Myspace page that didn’t look like it was made in 1996? The most important limitation on Vimeo Channels is that you can’t change the background color, it’s white. A nice neutral color. No color looks bad on top of white. No making a tiled background that’s going to take forever to load, no making horrible scrolling gifs that make the viewer want to poke their eyes out, just plain white.

Also, the font. You can’t change it either. Not that unusual I know, but more importantly, you can’t change the color! No making yellow text on white backgrounds and no using stupid Apple Chancery that won’t show up on 80% of the computers out there. Just a nice, plain, sans serif font. Just don’t be a douche and make the widget titles white text on light backgrounds… no fucking light yellow!

Finally, my favorite limitation of channels, no HTML embeds. Like any other modern website some HTML tags are OK, your not gonna have a hard time if you want to make something bold or in italics. However, there will be no pasting in autoplaying movies or songs on Vimeo Channels. Just a nice pretty place for you to share you content and interact with your viewers. Simply put, it’s the way channels should be done.

(a little note, I’ll be puting up a Vimeo Channel for video content related to this site. If you like this site and like Vimeo, please subscribe. Link in the side bar… I hope.)