Debatable. If it’s empty and is going to remain empty for a period of time, maybe hold off? Or at least get a ‘channel trailer’ sort of video up, that describes what the channel is/will be. Don’t intentionally take your users into a dead end in their browsing experience, or their impression will sour. A link is effectively a promise that something is on the other end that was worthy of linking. Don’t break your promises.
IMHO, a subscribe button on the website is a bit of a stretch if you’re not using the youtube content on the website itself. Consider where you see subscribe buttons on YouTube - where you can see the content of the channel! It’s a “You liked watching this” or “You see all these videos that X has made, want to see them in your feed? Click here.”
If you just throw a subscribe button onto your page without having shown any of the content to the user, you’re asking them psychologically to affirm something you haven’t proven; that they want to see more of the content that you haven’t shown them.
Your channel is linkable like any other URL in the world. Youtube, for all of their foibles, does have guidance on how to find/set your channel URL. An individual video can be linked by simply going to the video you want to link to, and copy the URL from your address bar.
A picture link that will usually take you to the channel page.
It was implied that I will soon be adding YouTube videos, so in that context…
Okay, so a “Subscribe” button makes more sense on my YouTube channel itself? Or maybe in the actual videos?
But I was asking how to make a link using a YouTube icon.
You see websites all over that have these little bars with buttons to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
I doubt people are stealing images off of the Internet and making linked images.
My question assumes that there is some easy way to enter the URL to my YouTube channel and have it spit out code that I paste into my web page and I get some nifty YouTube button/icon that when you click on it takes you to my YouTube channel.
(I believe PayPal has a wizrd like that to add a PayPal button to your site so people can click on it and then buy something…)
Every channel has a Subscribe button; it’s just underneath the videos while watching them, and on the main channel page as well. Those are put there by YouTube.
… welllll… I wouldn’t doubt that’s happening. People on the internet will ‘steal’ pretty much anything to make a link out of. But; YouTube WANT you to put a link on your site with their branding that takes you to their site where they can show videos that generate them ad revenue.
Paypal do indeed.
I’m not aware of one that YouTube have; that said, an image link is simply what it says on the tin; or rather, the inverse thereof; stick an <img> tag inside an <a> tag. Instant clickable image.
Youtube do offer their logo images up on their Brand Resouces page, with links to download them for incorporation. That page also gives some do’s and dont’s, as well as the color codes used in their branding.
So when people have those social media “toolbars” on their websites with buttons that link to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, etc, then apparently they are going out and grabbing logos from these companies and then coding HTML using an < img > tag nested inside of an < a > tag?
You could use this format to make an image clickable:
<a href="http://the URL of the page you are linking to.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="../images/the link to the YouTube image.jpg in your /images folder" style="width: 50px"></a>
Just replace my explanatory text in two places with your links, and 50px width for your preferred width.
The “button” is merely a jpg image. You download the image, copy it to your site’s /images folder, then reference it like this, assuming “YouTubeImage.jpg” is the name of your image: /images/YouTubeImage.jpg
rel="noopener" is included for security. You can leave it out.
target="_blank" is telling the browser to open a new window or tab to display the content.