Diamonds and their Four Cs

Here at JAREEYA, we don't sit still and work hard to provide you with a great and informative website. Not just for shopping, but also to provide you with some more insights and knowledge of the fantastic world of fine jewellery.

We put the first few articles together that deal with diamonds and what is to know about them. To start with, you can read about the famous Four Cs, to give you a quick starting point. This article summarises the four most commonly evaluated attributes of diamonds: Colour, Clarity, Carat weight and Cut.

Since the article is on our site, we do not go into too much detail here and instead only give a very brief summary of the four Cs here, to give you a taste what is discussed on our website:

Colour: The diamond's colour, graded from D (colourless) to Z (light yellow colour). The less colour a diamond has, the more valuable it generally is. Fancy coloured diamonds are not covered by the colour grading system of the four Cs.

Clarity: Looks at internal and surface defects of diamonds. Blemishes, inclusions, cracks, etc. all diminish the value of a diamond and in more severe cases can limit the durability of the stone itself. Flawless diamonds are priced the highest. Assessing the clarity of a diamond is a complex subject and requires the competence of a skilled grader.

Carat Weight: The title says it all: How heavy a particular stone is, measured in the units of Carat. One carat equals 0.2g (1/5 of a gram) and it is divided into 100 sub-units called points. All other factors being equal, the heavier a diamond is, the more expensive it is, although exceptions do exist when demand is higher for smaller stones.

Cut: Describes how a diamond is cut. The most common cut is brilliant (or round) cut. Other cuts are cushion, baguette, heart or fancy cut. Brilliant cut diamonds normally maximise a stone's beauty but other cuts may be suited better, depending on type of jewellery, to preserve an uncut stone's weight or to eliminate unsightly inclusions.

If you want to go into more details than just scratching the surface of the four Cs, then we also provide you with some more detailed articles for each of the four Cs, but without getting too technical. Currently, the following articles are available for you to browse:

• Diamonds and the 4 Cs
• Carat Weight
• Clarity Grading
• Colour Grading
• Cut (coming soon)

We hope you find the articles of interest and enjoy the read.

Best wishes,

Your JAREEYA-Team

Nobody likes to wait

This morning, an interesting article appeared on BBC's most read stories which summarised some findings of how a fast website helps businesses to increase sales – and how a slow one is bad. And what is good for a business is usually good for their customers too. Undoubtedly, you will also prefer a fast loading page over one that allows you to go for a cup of tea while waiting for the images to load.

While we do not want to endorse the trend of ever-increasing speeds and superlatives in every facet of life – after all it is nice to simply enjoy the moment every now and then without rushing through the day – there is also nothing wrong to speed things up on the technological side. Take your time to explore our site. But it should be time spent looking and browsing, not waiting for pages slowly appearing block by block. And that's our job here: Provide you with a fast website while not neglecting good product images and an overall pleasant visual appearance and functionality.

Now, what is JAREEYA doing to provide you with a great online experience?

The main factor is that our website is entirely built in-house, with only the absolute minimum of external plug-ins. Not only saves this a lot of costs associated with tasking this to an experienced website developer, but it also means we know our website in and out. Something needs changing? Something wrong? No problem, any updates and fixes are quickly made. We also refrain from pre-built websites or website building tools: The generated code is cluttered with junk which causes unnecessary delays and potentially decreased functionality.

To make sure you get a fast and responsive site, we test pages with tools like google's pagespeed and others. This gives useful insights as to what components of a website cause delays. Obviously, a website's speed also depends on where it is physically hosted and from where you try to access it. The day this article was published, our website www.jareeya.com managed a very fast load time of under 1 second from a server in Sweden! This takes it into the category of the fastest websites around and the speeds within the UK should be even higher (our website is hosted on a server in London). However, the actual speed depends on your own internet connection and may be slower than 1 second.

We streamlined our checkout process: You can see what is in your cart, make any changes to it and then go through the normal steps of checkout all on the same page! If you pay with debit or credit card, the entire checkout is done on the same page as your basket and shaves off seconds of the payment process (after all, paying is not the most exciting moment during your visit, so let's keep this quick and simple – while maintaining high security standards). But you do not need to worry that you click the wrong button and accidentally pay for something you do not like: The checkout process is hidden until you are ready to go through it.

Did you know that two pictures that look identical are not necessarily the same? Photos you shoot with your digital cameras include so called meta-data: Data that saves further details about the image, for example date and time photo taken, exposure length, user information, etc. These is extra data that would be loaded by the webserver but is of no use to the viewer. The same picture can also be represented by different file formats, each having its own particular benefits and drawbacks. Images on JAREEYA's website strip out redundant data, uses the best file format for its purpose and compresses images for the best balance of fast loading times and maintaining high quality.

Currently, JAREEYA's website gets good results in google's pagespeed tool (not top grade, but all in the “green” area). JAREEYA's in-house web-developer managed to get sites reaching the 100 mark (out of 100), but for our case we will need to settle on slightly lower scores: Just because google tells you what is best and fastest does not translate into the best solution for you as our customer. We still have some improvements to do, even though our website is in a very good and fast state already. Yet we continue to optimise and fine-tune – we never settle with good being good enough and strive to bring you the very best ;-)

Looking forward to welcoming you to an even faster site,

Your JAREEYA-Team