I like the theory, not sure about the practice

  • With more and more visitors with mobile devices, this seems like a great idea. At least in theory. It’s not at all clear whether anyone actually finds and/or wants to see the web stories.

    I created one story to understand how it works. The editor is great, but I was disappointed that it seems to be completely separate from the rest of my website. I ended up creating a blog post and a separate web story with roughly the same content. That seemed silly, so instead I embedded the story on the blog post, but that seems silly too. Neither the web story or the modified blog post seemed like an ideal way to tell a story.

    I have never seen a web story on any other website, so I am having a hard time imagining how this might be used in practice.

    I am also frustrated that the plugin registers a bunch of extra image sizes. My media library is potentially twice as large, with no particular benefit I can see. I get that the web story viewport is a different size than a browser window (although maybe not on mobile), but the images in the story are never exactly full screen. The editor makes it easy to size them larger or smaller to create a meaningful layout. So then these extra image sizes are just that: extra.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • @kennethrg Thank you for this review and your feedback! I can understand how it may be difficult to think of ways to put Web Stories into practice. Web Stories are designed for content like editorial or journalistic content. You can tell “a story” directly on your website. The readers can consume the content from the site or mobile website. The Web Story tap-through format gives users a more interactive space for engagement and the fast-loading format will improve your search engine visibility. Embedded links make it easy for Stories to be virally distributed, and you are not limited to just one app.

    You can learn more about Web Stories at our Web Stories site, the “Storytime” videos on our YouTube channel, or check out these 10 example Web Stories.

    WordPress processes the images, not Web Stories, so the extra image sizes in your media library could possibly be due to the WordPress core feature creating multiple images (see here). If you are having issues or need further support we’d be happy to investigate for you in the support forum.

    Thread Starter kennethrg

    (@kennethrg)

    Hi,
    Thanks for the example web stories.

    The extra image sizes I’m referring to are the five additional sizes created in includes/Media.php by calling the add_image_size() function. Like I said, these are only useful if the images are displayed the exact size of the story pane, and even then most of them are close enough to the default WordPress sizes to not provide a noticeable performance benefit.

    Plugin Author Pascal Birchler

    (@swissspidy)

    If I may chime in here regarding the image sizes:

    Those are needed to adhere to the Web Story format’s requirements for poster images and publisher logos. Not for performance benefits. While I would *love* to avoid creating unnecessary image sizes, WordPress does not provide any functionality for plugin developers to add image sizes only when needed. That’s why one has to use add_image_size() like this.

    Thread Starter kennethrg

    (@kennethrg)

    Pascal,
    That makes a lot more sense. I wonder if something like the make_subsize() function would allow you to do a one-off image resize and/or crop to get the needed size only for the poster image and publisher logo. If not, it seems like there should be a way to do this; I can think of a lot of use cases when a single image is needed at a particular size (site logo in a theme, for example).

    Anyway, thanks for all your hard work on this!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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