Overcoming the bottlenecks of media management for designers, developers, digital managers, and business executives

Managing the media workflow can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive task, especially when it comes to integrating assets online. Both creative and marketing teams strive to enhance web performance by declining variants, while developers face the challenge of seamlessly integrating these assets.

The complexity of integrating media online

Integrating images and videos into websites is more complex than it seems. While a single person could take care of all image-related issues of a small website, the larger projects typically employ multiple in-house and external professionals dealing with the images and their online delivery.

The vast diversity of users’ screens brings the following difficulties:

• The proper handling of responsive images and videos, as well as the optimization of these assets for load speed, is per se a challenge for front-end developers.
• Putting images online requires alignment and smooth collaboration between the website’s designers and developers. Think of art direction (badly cropped images might fail to focus on the right details), or the conflict between visual quality and load speed.
• New images and videos are regularly added to most websites. Any manual steps in their treatment might make the processes time-consuming and error-prone.

The following scheme gives a very simplified view of image management tasks and the roles involved in their execution:

The present article considers four cases of creative and technical specialists facing the bottlenecks of image management - and shows how they managed to streamline their workflow with TwicPics to improve their results.

Web Developers’ problem: image quality is the enemy of load speed

Web developers face a persistent challenge: the conflict between image quality and load speed. The high-resolution images are a great driver for user engagement, but they can also significantly slow down the page load, leading to frustration and potential loss of visitors. Teams always have to find the optimal compromise between quality and performance. The stakes are particularly high for websites heavily relying on visuals - like those devoted to lifestyle, fashion, art, or travel. Without the right tools, the mission often becomes a nightmare.

Dayuse tried Thumbor for the generation of multiple differently-sized versions of the responsive images but didn’t see the performance improvement. Reconciling visual quality and fast load speed is a more complex task for developers. TwicPics Components for the various JavaScript frameworks (Vue/Nuxt, React/Next, Svelte) adapted to the diverse technical environments of Dayuse websites, helped them achieve stellar performance, and accelerated production launches.

Dayuse

Discover Dayuse case study.

Moreover, the visuals prepared by the creative department are often not adapted to the context of Internet users. For example, the homepage of Afibel’s website is at the heart of the IT department's concerns. It plays a vital role in the purchasing process and serves as a platform to showcase the brand.

Unfortunately, the teams responsible for contributing to this page are not always aware of web constraints. Images of several megabytes broadcast online caused significant performance issues. When users encounter difficulties navigating the site, it negatively impacts the brand's image, leading them to leave the website. That’s why the Afibel IT department decided to integrate TwicPics and finally succeeded in solving this problem while simplifying the contribution team’s work.

Afibel

Discover Afibel case study.

CTO’s problem: delivering assets online in a multi-solutions environment

The setup of the image management workflow and the implementation of responsive image optimization can take a significant amount of time. And even more so if the organization uses multiple CMS, which is the case for 62% of the brands, according to a study by Storyblok.

For instance, Studio Meta, a web agency, manages and develops websites on several CMS (Wordpress, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Drupal, Shopify), as well as custom-made websites built with PHP frameworks (Laravel) or JS frameworks (Vue.js). TwicPics being an agnostic solution, it adapts to all technical stacks and integrates easily into all these projects. Developers no longer need to worry about integrating visual content, whether on a legacy environment or in modern frameworks. Consequently, they can devote more time to high-added-value missions. Moreover, more junior developers can reach the same level of productivity and performance and as the more senior ones.

Studio Meta

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Bringing back the example of the previous section, Afibel was also able to benefit from integrating TwicPics into their composable architecture. The Afibel IT department succeeded in reducing the time-to-market. The publication of a new product is now taking only a few minutes, compared to several hours before, from the PIM and DAM to the website.

E-commerce Manager: improving online results

The perceived quality and load speed of the images are even more important in the e-commerce context, as these two conflicting factors have a direct impact on the conversion rate. Poorly optimized images could ruin the efforts of e-commerce managers on many levels:

• undermine the SEO
• break the ROI of paid acquisition
• hurt return visits

One of the largest French digital-native vertical brands Envie de Fraise tried both manual image optimization and an alternative service before finally choosing TwicPics in 2019. The image delivery is now outsourced to TwicPics, which tailors the appropriately sized version in the right format for each user in real time, depending on the device context.

The post-integration results were meaningful. The visual quality was so much better that people were heard wondering, "The images are too good for such small file sizes!" According to Clément Candelier, Digital IT Director for the group, TwicPics was a major contributor to the increase in business KPIs: the conversion rate is now at 3.5% and even reaches 10% during promotional campaigns.

Envie de Fraise

Discover Envie de Fraise case study.

Conclusion

In their quest for better performance and streamlined workflows, Dayuse, Afibel, Envie de Fraise and Studio Meta teams have turned to TwicPics, which offers simplified integration and powerful media optimization capabilities. The improved processes boosted user experience…and also the experience of the employees from the different departments.