Images and video are a core component of websites, mobile apps and our digital life. They deliver exciting content and improve the user experience by delivering the best format, size and quality to meet each web visitor’s unique needs
Video is an increasingly important component for websites - whether it’s to inform visitors, enhance user experience or support sales and marketing efforts. But delivering high-quality video at large scale can be quite a challenge. You need to consider encoding, format, bandwidth usage, delivery and the devices on which visitors may be watching the video, to name just a few concerns.
Thrillophilia is India’s largest online tours and activities platform. Through its website and app, the company offers a one-stop solution for travelers looking for tours, activities and things to do. Users can choose from more than 10,000 activities in 200+ cities in India and 15 countries in Asia. Headquartered in Bangalore, India, the company was founded in 2011 and employs more than 50 people.
Everyone knows the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. But what most people don’t realize about images is what needs to be taken into consideration when using them on websites and in mobile apps.
There’s no debating the fact that including images on your website or mobile app draws the interest of users and leads to stronger engagement. For example, posts that include images produce 650 percent higher engagement than text-only posts, according to a WebDAM infographic. Use of attention-grabbing images is only going to grow. Consider that by 2018, 84 percent of communication will be visual, the infographic noted.
Images – if you’re a developer, there’s no doubt that at one time or another, you’ve probably worked with a lot of image files, and may have been tasked with ensuring a top-notch user experience or continually improving website and app performance. You may have posed questions on online message boards, or sought advice from your developer colleagues. But there hasn’t been a conference that solely focused on image management…until now.
Last week, 15 of us here at Cloudinary headed back to Las Vegas for the annual AWS re:Invent conference. We returned as exhibitors again this year since we had such a successful experience in 2015, when we introduced Cloudinary to many new companies that could benefit from our image and video management tools.
Attending our first Velocity Web Performance Conference, we wanted to WOW attendees with the Cloudinary solution. And WOW them we did, with the announcement of our new “Images Solved” enhancements, which offer fully automated content- and context-aware image adaptation.
The most common frustrations voiced by people when visiting a website are the time it takes for pages to load and the amount of bandwidth some sites eat from their monthly mobile plans.
What these users might not realize is that, in many cases, the culprit is the same: website image performance. Ensuring images are optimized is particularly important to businesses who manage these sites since they account for the majority of the downloaded bytes on a web page, and can slow down load times considerably.
We spent part of last week at The O'Reilly Fluent Conference 2016 in San Francisco, taking the opportunity to show off the impressive image and video transformation capabilities of Cloudinary to the developer community.