22Slides

After years in the making, we're proud to finally release 22Slides V2.

Why a new version?

The internet was a different place when we launched, eleven years ago. Industry standards, market expectations, and technology have all changed, sometimes drastically.

Over that time, we'd made thousands of additions to the platform to create the absolute best product possible. But, given the changed mentioned above and our desire to push the platform further, it became obvious that it was time to make some foundational changes that wouldn't be backwards-compatible with our existing system.

What to expect

With V2, we've doubled-down on what we know best: Simplicity and ease-of use. You can expect the same type of intuitive tools and designs that propelled V1 to its success, but with more powerful features, more flexible architecture, and more modern interfaces.

What about V1?

22Slides V1 isn't going anywhere. We'll continue to maintain it like we always have. At the time of writing this, V1 is our primary product, and will likely continue to be so for a long time.

Even if/when that changes, V1 is a bootstrapped service that can maintain profitability even at a tiny scale. We'd dare to call it one of the most resilient services on the internet today, so there's no foreseeable reason to ever shut it down.

We have plenty of clients that prefer V1, and it's extremely important to us that they understand they remain first-class customers. V1 clients enjoy being grandfathered into their existing pricing plans, and are technically the most profitable to our business. V1 clients' support requests and website reliability will always remain a top priority.

The only difference concerning V1 now is that our home page promotes V2.

More Info

You can check out more info about the differences between V1 and V2 here: https://help.22slides.com/article/101-22slides-v1-and-v2

We’ve got something big in the works. If you’d like to help out by joining our beta testing team, shoot us a message!

Otherwise, you can check out some sneak peaks on our Twitter page.

Your home page now looks better-than-ever on mobile devices, thanks to a few new features we just released this week.

Larger images that fill the screen

One challenge for us has always been to display large full-screen images (usually meant for landscape-oriented desktop monitor display) on small portrait-oriented devices.

The obvious and least-exciting solution was to scale images down to the device’s width, so no prominent part of the image was cropped out. This often created lots of negative space both above and below the image and left the page looking empty.

Now, mobile home pages display images much larger, filling almost the entire screen, while never cropping your subject out of the photo, due to the new focal point feature explained below.

Focal Points

Displaying photos across multiple devices, each with different sizes and wildly-different aspect ratios, creates lots of opportunity for unfavorable cropping.

If you’ve ever uploaded an image with its subject close to the edge of the frame, then resized your browser window, you may have noticed that sometimes the important part of the image can get cut off.

Our new focal point feature fixes this, by allowing you to manually choose your home page images’ focal points, ensuring that when (and only when) your images have to be cropped, it’s done so in a way that preserves their integrity.

Slideshows

Mobile home pages also now respect your slideshow settings and will display your images in large, silky-smooth (hardware-accelerated) slideshows, should you enable that option in your control panel.

Originally, the decision to omit slideshows from mobile sites was due to the limited connection speeds of most mobile devices. Slideshows used to severely slow page loads speeds, hurting the overall experience of that first impression many people with have with your brand.

But, due to both our recent responsive dynamic-resolution image delivery system (which ensures only images that are perfectly-sized to the viewer’s screen and resolution are downloaded), and improvements to modern cell networks, the time-cost of displaying a slideshow is negligible or totally unnoticeable.

While we’re located in California and happily complying with government’s lockdown policies, our business regularly operates remotely and current events shouldn't affect our service.

Many of you are finding this to be a great time to improve your websites, and we want to let you know that we want to do as much as we can to help.

We are temporarily providing complimentary web design services, including help from professional web designers and developers who can help with anything from answering simple questions, to tweaking things here and there for you, to getting your logo looking perfect, to custom-coding an idea you may have in your head.

Think of us as your personal web designers.

We understand things may be difficult at the moment, but we think small businesses and mom-and-pop shops like yours and ours can turn this into an opportunity for all of us to work together and come out of it even better than before.

To take advantage of these services, simply contact us using the chat bubble at the lower-right of your admin area.

Take care and stay safe!
- The 22Slides Team

From your “Settings” page, you can now manually choose an image to be displayed when you share your site to places like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

When we launched nearly nine years ago, we limited the number of images per site to just 200, and have been slowly raising that limit over the years, until we reached the current limit of 1,000.

We're happy to report that many of the changes we've been making behind the scenes are paying off, and starting today, we're able to raise this limit more than we've ever raised it before: from 1,000 to 1,500.