Fresh Exchange

Focused On Content & Reader Engagement

Fresh Exchange is a lifestyle, run by Mike & Megan Gilger, which hosts a number of web properties: a lifestyle blog with a sizable content archive, a design portfolio for consultancy work and a curated online shop. The goals for this redesign were to reorganize content (categorization and tagging), and optimize the site for better page speed.

Related Articles

The related articles section was a focal point in the redesign. As such, it was important to display the most relevant articles in this section to promote continued reading of additional content. The large image-based tiles at the bottom of each post pull in content from the same category as the current article. The articles displayed in this section are ordered by popularity, which is established using an internal “likes” metric driven by a heart icon/action that is displayed on each article.

Faster Load Times

Another goal was to improve the page speed for the site. The Fresh Exchange has an archive of thousands of articles. Each of those article will usually include 6-10 images within the post content. I focused on optimizing all images on the website. This meant reducing the file size of each image using lossy compression utilities and lazy loading any images that are not visible when a page is loaded. In addition to the image optimizations, I compressed all theme assets and enabled browser and server-level caching. Together this helped take the average load time from 4s/page down to 1s/page.

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