As the web becomes more visually driven, images make up a big part of every web page. People like to see interesting graphics, not just a bunch of text. Understandably so, who wants to stare at a wall of text ? If it's not a good book, then most people definitely won't. As a result It's becoming more important, almost a requirement to use Content Distribution Networks for websites in order to keep up with user expectations and world class standards, even to increase or maintain customer retention.
We've been through quite a few networks and methodologies for delivery our websites static assets. Months ago, we started using the CloudFront CDN this ensured your images loaded very fast no matter where your users were visiting your website from. CloudFront is a world class Content Distribution Network which allows for the easy and fast access of static assets throughout the world. We were pleased with the results and the load times for our websites fell accordingly with the switch.
Yet, we still weren't quite satisfied with the speed, flexibility and consistency with which our static assets were being delivered, we wanted to do better than the competition. So we decided, why not build our own asset delivery solution? And so we did! Enter: The FleekSite Image Resize API for Web Developers on the FleekSite Platform. With this, we were able to allow images to be resized, cropped, reposition, compressed or even blurred on the fly with no extra work for the user. This also allowed files sizes to be reduced, and along with all those benefits, we gained control over the consistency of our asset delivery, as the amount of traffic and the time it took to get and deliver an asset was completely controlled by us.
Yep, you guessed it! We still weren't satisfied, what does it take to satisfy us? Who knows, but we think we may have hit the jackpot with this one.
One of the new content delivery providers we now use is ImgIX, these guys are something special, they take what we did with RESIZE, add a bunch more features and a I mean a lot and they add their global CDN to the mix to ensure the assets get delivered as fast as possible. Not only can we do our usual image manipulations, we can enhance our images with effects, watermarks.
