How do you show the world all that our vibrant campus community has to offer when a pandemic’s been raging for 2 years and we’ve de-densified the campus to keep everyone safe? You get creative with photography!
Our photographers played with camera angles and depth of field to shoot subjects who were abiding by social distancing recommendations and mask-wearing.
And since returning to campus last fall, we’ve updated and curated our UMassD Collection with 50+ new images and assets to help visually tell our story.
University Marketing is dedicated to improving umassd.edu website performance. We recently launched several improvements to umassd.edu image processing to ensure optimal web performance across all devices and regions.
Truly responsive images
Same image will be served up in different sizes depending on your screen size.
Images have been visually responsive on umassd.edu for best display on all devices; they scale up/down. Images on umassd.edu are now set to crop down to the best-fit for that particular device. Simply put: mobile device loads an image much smaller than a desktop computer. The result is better performance on mobile devices that suffer from slow internet speeds due to data plan or signal strength.
Image optimization
Optimizing images is all about balancing file size and image quality. Images are now optimized and resized in Terminalfour without the need to rely on content editors’ knowledge of image-editing software or compression methods.
Modern formats
Most images on umassd.edu are now processed as WebP. Using WebP, we can serve smaller, richer images that make the web faster. [source] If you are using an older browser, we have jpg available to display as a fallback. This all happens without the need for our content editors to engage, just upload your single jpg image, same as before.
Content delivery
Most of umassd.edu assets are now served through a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDN serves assets from a location nearer to the visitor, speeding up the site and improving the overall user experience. Globally distributed CDN servers ensure that regardless of where your site is hosted, its assets will be served from a location close to your visitors.
lazy loading illustration source: imperva.com
Lazy loading
University Marketing recently upgraded our lazy load engine [source – Vanilla Lazyload]. Lazyload speeds up your web application by deferring the loading of your below-the-fold images, animated SVGs, videos and iframes to when they enter the viewport. You may notice some images fade into view as you scroll down the page, that’s Lazyload!
UMassD Marketing Department with the assist! Take a peek at just a few ways we helped promote the Men’s Basketball team’s journey to the Sweet Sixteen.
Corsair Content Checklist
Thanks to our partners in Athletics and Public Affairs, there was plenty to share!
✅ Game coverage ✅ Student Story
✅ Graphics ✅ Marquee ✅ Post-event recap ✅ Streaming promotions ✅ Press Opportunities ⬆️ Where did it all end up? Social media.
Significant improvements have been made to the university’s program searches in the last month. Using an updated module, the search can now filter more quickly and efficiently and with more filter options than previously. In addition to the search within ALL programs, we currently have searches isolated to Undergraduate programs and STEM programs.
Program search before the redesignProgram search after the redesign
