Culture Index exists to catalog cultural institutions online, and highlight the best practices that inspire us.
Launching with a focus on museums and building from there, we are a resource for both research and discovery. Browse information about online communications, and discover ideas with examples of what’s possible for cultural institutions in the digital space.
As a community project facilitated by Base, we invite you to use and contribute to this growing resource.
ImgIx
At Base, we commonly work with websites that feature a large volume of visual assets, especially for cultural institutions that showcase collections, events, articles, and more. Managing and optimizing these images efficiently is critical to delivering high-quality visuals without compromising performance.
ImgIx is a powerful image optimization and delivery service that helps developers automatically adjust and enhance images in real-time. It provides features like automatic resizing, cropping, format conversion, and optimization, all through a simple URL-based API. By using ImgIx, images can be dynamically adapted to different devices and screen sizes without needing manual adjustments, ensuring the best possible experience for every user.
Optimizing images for different devices and screen sizes is crucial because it significantly impacts both performance and user experience. Large or improperly sized images can slow down load times, especially on mobile devices with slower connections, which can lead to higher bounce rates and a poor user experience. By serving appropriately sized and compressed images for each device, websites load faster, use less bandwidth, and provide a smoother, more engaging experience, particularly for users on mobile or lower-powered devices.
Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for images and videos is equally important because it improves the delivery speed and reliability of media assets. A CDN stores copies of images and videos on servers distributed around the world, ensuring that content is delivered from the server closest to the user. ImgIx also includes a built-in CDN, further enhancing its ability to deliver optimized images quickly and efficiently. This reduces latency, speeds up load times, and minimizes server strain, especially for global audiences. Additionally, CDNs provide scalability and help handle traffic spikes, ensuring that images and videos load quickly and consistently, even during periods of high demand.