Liven Up Your Web Site With Free Clip Art and Photos

By using free stock photos your site can be transformed, giving a truly polished image that will impress your customers. Stock photos are images where permision has been granted for their commercial use.

It is important that you have the permission to display any images that are on your site, copying an image from another site could land you in court. Not Good. This is where free stock photography comes in. There are web sites which offer images for free or for very little cost, some of which are listed below:

stock.xchng - This site offers a wide selection of free stock photos that have been donated by photographers for anybody to use free of charge. The service requires that you create an account efore you can begin downloading images. It also requires that you contact the photographer prior to using the image as a courtesy, perhaps leaving comments about why you liked it. stock.xchng looks like an excellent service.

istockphoto - The stock photographs on this site are not free, but are very cheap at around 30p ($0.5) each. The photos on this site are very impressive, business people shaking hands, computers, happy children they're all there.

Gimp Savvy - This site contains thousands of public domain images from various U.S. agancies including NASA, UDSA, NoOA and FWS. While not as polished as the images you'll find in the above sites, its still worth a look. I was particularly impressed by some of the NASA space images.

Although there are many other sites out there that offer stock photos, many are extremely expensive. istockphoto is popular with many web site designers, their images could really make your web site stand out. stock.xchng looks impressive too, especially as their photos are free to use.

When downloading photos for your web site, its best to opt for the cheaper low resolution images as these will be compressed still further (into even lower resolution) for your site. This compression ensures that sites load quickly and means that your customers won't leave before it downloads.

If you have any further questions about selecting images for your site then don't hesitate to contact us