Customer-facing aspects of sales software solutions are what the designers’ hell is made of. The product should be intuitive and easy to navigate without reading a laundry list of instructions. So you use the industry-standard layout with traditional grids. This makes the solution look boring, thus you introduce clever elements and menus to stand out from the competition. These innovations confuse users, and you get stuck in a vicious cycle of balancing usability and beauty. More importantly, you forget about the page load time or application response speed and have to start from scratch.
One way to solve this last issue is by using an image uploader, a part of a content delivery system (CDN) designed to make websites and apps faster. Let’s take a look at three ways a CDN can make your life easier by implementing the best practices of dealing with visuals.
- Optimized Images for Shorter Load Times
When it comes to business proposals or closing deals, paperwork is still king, even if it’s digital. While you could use any word processor to draft the copy, making it look good is a painful process, unless you use specialized software like PandaDoc. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface helps craft clean and stylish documents in no time.
One of the key features of PandaDoc is the ability to upload and use proprietary images, including signatures. Without an ability to optimize users’ visuals on the fly, the system would be slow and cumbersome. To ensure top performance, the product relies on Uploadcare’s CDN that takes care of storing, processing, and delivering images to users without lags and crashes. The media delivery system ensures that images are uploaded and downloaded at speed, while automatic cropping and format conversions ensure error-free operation of the web app.
Another huge benefit of using CDN for PandaDoc and similar sales products is eliminating user-side connection speed requirements. Since there is no need to log huge amounts of visual data across the worldwide web, clients can create and edit documents in real-time even if their broadband capacity leaves much to be desired. Image CDN is a worthwhile investment for any sales solution looking to lower page load time.
- Adaptive Media Design for Every Display Size
The connected world we live in makes public relationship management a must for international companies, entrepreneurs, non-profits, and individuals. Prezly is an all-in-one PR product that promises to eliminate the fuss and ensure faster and better communication between PR managers and their audiences.
Unsurprisingly, regardless of the chosen plan, all Prezly users get access to a media gallery. PR is impossible without visuals, be it a news post or an announcement. While tackling publications via a laptop or a desktop is a breeze with most software solutions, PR managers can never afford to be caught unawares, even if the only Internet-connected device they have is a smartphone. For this reason, image and video handling must be dealt with the same ease and comfort on a screen of any size.
Using a visual CDN is the easiest and most efficient way to ensure images are displayed correctly on mobile devices. Instead of using one file for all interfaces, the system automatically returns a version of the image already cropped and scaled to fit a smaller screen without messing with the mobile interface layout. Shorter load time is another invaluable benefit that’s crucial for mobile Internet users who haven’t had the pleasure of switching to 5G yet.
- Custom Animated Images to Grab Attention
Despite the growing number of software developers and web designers, many businesses cannot afford to hire an outsourcing team or a dedicated coder. Webflow comes to the rescue and breaks the code barrier, allowing anyone to create beautiful, responsive websites, launch, and scale them without any technical knowledge.
Webflow boasts a user-friendly web interface that can turn anyone into a designer in no time. Users can create pages, build forms, manage accounts, and open online stores. However, none of these is possible without visuals, and adding a bit of animation is always a sure way to catch the eye and direct the customer towards the desired action. Instead of building an infrastructure to handle user media, Webflow relies on a CDN to host and deliver images as necessary. Unlike centralized hosting, edge servers of media delivery systems ensure faster response time and enable real-time web design via an online interface. Load time is especially important for animated media, as file sizes increase.
One look at the Webflow homepage and product pages is enough to see how the company embraces the power of animated visuals. Short demonstrations of the interface and its elements provide a much-needed understanding for non-technical specialists. Without these animated blocks, it would have taken pages of text and dozens of slides to familiarize potential clients with the Webflow toolset.
B2B software solutions, such as PandaDoc, Prezly, and Webflow, rely heavily on visual content to entice new clients and make their products user-friendly, fast, and efficient. Although using an image CDN, such as Uploadcare, is not a necessity, it brings multiple benefits to sales products. Among them are optimizing images on the fly, incorporating animated visuals, and making them equally beautiful across a variety of display sizes. Other CDN advantages may include computer vision to identify objects and people, as well as automatic tagging for easier media gallery management, and even color-coordination based on the images’ palette. These features are less obvious on the client-side of business apps, but they could be crucial for admins.
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