To engage with modern users, today’s websites must be extremely visual. Even though high-quality images and videos can help keep visitors on the site and convert them, those media assets also add to the page weight, load time, and bandwidth. Unoptimized content can result in performance issues, causing visitors to bounce off.
I still remember well my first week as a DevOps at Cloudinary. The year was 2017. Everything was new to me—people, laptop, processes—all of which to become familiar with in short order. A mantra often repeated to me in those days was that, Cloudinary being a SaaS, continuous service uptime is its most important goal.
Slideshows. Though sometimes boring, they are an essential cog in the corporate wheel, having served for decades as the medium for presentations. For a more lively display, consider combining various media types into a single video slideshow, which could serve as compelling, personalized, and engaging content for your users. Additionally, you can apply sophisticated transition configurations and Cloudinary’s many transformation capabilities.
Many Cloudinary users desire a UI for tasks like creating text overlays for images, which they then embed on webpages or download for marketing campaigns. Generating such overlays with the Cloudinary Media Library UI involves a bit of a learning curve, especially if they require multiple fonts or text lines, which even experienced users might find challenging to implement.
In this age of most sites being static, a frequently asked question is how much dynamic functionality you can derive from Jamstack. The answer is a lot because you can incorporate reusable APIs in that architecture and leverage serverless, back-end-oriented functions with no back ends in place.
As defined by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amplify is a set of products and tools with which mobile and front-end web developers can build and deploy AWS-powered, secure, and scalable full-stack apps. Also, you can efficiently configure their back ends, connect them to your app with just a few lines of code, and deploy static web apps in only three steps. Historically, because of their performance issues, managing images and videos is a daunting challenge for developers. Even though you can easily load media to an S3 bucket with AWS Amplify, transforming, compressing, and responsively delivering them is labor intensive and time consuming.
While COVID has affected most businesses, it has been particularly hard on those that sell products for the physical ‘brick and mortar’ world. One company that literally fits that bill is our Australian customer James Hardie, the largest global manufacturer of fibre cement products used in both domestic and commercial construction. These are materials that its buyers ideally want to see up close, in detail. When customers have questions, they expect personal service.
Part 1 of this post defines the capabilities of an enhanced Gravatar service, which I named Clavatar, and describes the following initial steps for building it:
This post, part 2 of the series, explains how to make Clavatar work like Gravatar and to develop Clavatar’s capabilities of enabling requests for various versions of the images related to user accounts.
GUESS? Inc. designs, markets, distributes, and licenses a lifestyle collection of contemporary apparel, denim, handbags, watches, eyewear, footwear, and other related consumer products. These products are distributed through branded GUESS Stores, as well as department and specialty stores around the world, and via e-commerce sites available to 55 countries. GUESS websites act as virtual storefronts that both sell their products and promote their brands, showcasing products in an easy-to-navigate experience that allows customers to see and purchase from its collections.