CategoryMedia

November 5, 2018 — Animated GIFs are popular on the web for good reason. They provide more engagement than an ordinary image, while remaining more digestible compared to a typical video. However GIFs are a terrible format for storing video and are often huge in size leading to slow page load times and high data usage. With HTML5 video, you can reduce the size of GIF content by up to 98% while still retaining the unique qualities of the GIF format in the browser. Today, Ayo Isaiah will show you how to convert animated GIFs to video files and examine how to properly embed these video files on the web so that they act just like a GIF would. Read more…

October 25, 2018 — Since video files are large, optimizing the video to be as small as possible will lead to faster video delivery, speeding up video start, lowering the number of stalls, and minimizing the effect of the quality of the video delivered. Of course, we need to balance startup speed and stalling with the third metric of quality. In this series of posts on video performance on the web, Doug Sillars takes a closer look at how video is being used today, what we can learn from it, and how to move forward in a way that promotes fast delivery and playback of video content on the web. Read more…

October 24, 2018 — Video content on the web increases customer engagement and satisfaction. Pages that load quickly have the same effect. The addition of video to your website will slow down the page rendering time, necessitating a balance between overall page load and video content. In this aticle, Doug Sillars will examine the important metrics to balance performance and video playback on the web, look at how video is being used today, and provide best practices on delivering video on the web. Read more…

July 24, 2018 — Images are powerful. They can provide key information and context to articles, or merely add humorous asides. They do anything for us that plain text just can’t by itself. But when there’s too much imagery, it can be frustrating for users on slow connections, or run afoul of data plan allowances. In this eBook, you’ll learn all about WebP: what it’s capable of, how it performs, how to convert images to the format in a variety of ways, and most importantly, how to use it. Meet “The WebP Manual,” our latest edition to the Smashing eBook Library that covers everything you need to know about the latest image format to sweep the web! Read more…

July 24, 2018 — In this excerpt from his eBook “The WebP Manual,” developer and author Jeremy Wagner will show you the many ways you can convert your existing images to the WebP format. Read more…

February 7, 2018 — We all want to load images fast on the web. Choosing the right image format, optimizing the quality and using responsive images are important tasks, but what can we do beyond that? As developers, we need to measure performance. We should care more about the loading experience of the websites we build. It’s great that we now have tools such as WebPageTest and Lighthouse that can help us easily measure the effect of using progressive image loading techniques. No more excuses! Read more…