Where To Find Free Pictures, Artwork And Animation For Your WebsiteGet Web Design Tips and Tricks on mps-web-design.com. Where To Find Free Pictures, Artwork And Animation For Your Website topic will increase your understanding on Web Design Tips and Tricks. We at mps-web-design.com only provide news, articles, information in Web Design Tips and Tricks. Web Design Tips and Tricks at mps-web-design.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
I asked myself that same question when I created my first website. It took me more than a few days of scouring the web to find what I needed. I Googled and Yahooed for many terms, including: art, clipart, clip art, graphics and free art. In the end, I found some great sites. Depending on what kind of website you have, finding these things can be easy or difficult. There are three main types of websites, personal, nonprofit and business. The first two can find dozens to hundreds of places to get free artwork that fits the theme of their site. A business site will have a more difficult time. This is because the people that make this artwork usually don't have a problem giving it to people who won't make money off of their website. Most personal sites don't make any money, and giving stuff to nonprofit sites is just, well, the right thing to do. But for a site designed for a business that plans on making money, the artist wants his cut. The artist's opinion is that, 'The business can afford it so they should pay.' For a business site, before surfing the web for graphics, you may want to consider making your own. You can draw the artwork and then scan it, or create it with Photoshop or any of the other graphic's programs that are out there. Or a friend who is artistic can do the drawings, or you could even barter with a professional artist. I have done all of these. The advantage of making your own artwork is that it will be unique and perfectly suited to your site. This will also be the most time consuming since you will have to create everything from scratch. Your next step involves using artwork created by others and available on the Internet, on CD's or in books. Before you use any of this artwork you must check the rights that they offer. It's back to that business / personal thing I mentioned above. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of websites that have all kinds of artwork available for people to use. Sometimes, the most difficult thing is to wade through hundreds of images to find just the one you want. There are two main types of clip art sites. Those offering general artwork that can be used on any site, and those offering 'themed' artwork. For example, I went to Celtic art sites to find the proper artwork for my Celtic themed site. Almost every graphic art site has a 'Terms of Use' page telling how their artwork can be used. To be safe, if you can't find this information, then don't use any of their artwork. The main reason you don't want to take artwork illegally is that if you use it on your site, and the artist contacts you and says you are not using it according to their 'Terms of Use,' then he can make you pay for it or force you to remove it from your site. 'Let them try,' you say? If you don't play fair, all they have to do is contact the host where your site is, tell them that you stole the artwork on your site, and the host will shut down your site. Besides, it's always better to play nice, and fair is fair. How would you feel if someone stole something of yours? Plus, if you spend a lot of time putting your site together, and then have to remove all the artwork and find new, it will prove to be a huge waste of your time. Also, if people are use to the look of your site and it suddenly changes you could lose customers. When you find a graphic you like, put your pointer onto it, click your right mouse button and select Save Image As. Then save the artwork to a folder where you can easily find it later. Make sure to keep track of where each piece of artwork came from. I do this in the file name, like 'Dragon2-Castle-Art.gif' or in a Word file, like Dragon2.gif came from CastleArt.com. This lets you easily go back and find other artwork on this site if you need to. Some places that have free artwork require you to put a link on your site to their site. I feel that this little piece of advertisement is well worth it for the artwork. I created a section on my Links page for all the people who supplied artwork for my site. Not exactly free, but close are the sites on the Internet that offer artwork and photographs for a fee. You usually pay a flat fee, and can download all you want. In cases like this, I usually set a day or two aside, pay for the shortest time I can, usually a week or a month, and do nothing but download artwork. I can then use this artwork whenever I want. Again, check the 'Terms of Use' to be sure they say this is okay, or at least don't say not to do this. The cost for this can be anywhere from $8 to hundreds of dollars. Another low cost option is sites that have large collections of artwork on CD's. You pay for the CD and shipping and they send you a CD filled with hundreds of graphics. For these sites, I would want to see what would be included on the CD. If they don't show everything that will be on the CD, they should show at least 100 images. I would hate to be shown 10 to 20 great images, pay for the CD, then find out that the rest of the images on the CD look like garbage. Again, check the 'Terms of Use' for these images. Along these same lines, art supply stores often carry clipart books; some include all of the images on a CD too. I have several from Dover Publications that have great stuff in them. Clipart books range in price from $5 to $25. Most are in the lower price range. When you are designing your site, be sure to think ahead. Maybe your site is a personal page now, but if think it may become a business site somewhere down the line, then be sure the graphics can be used on the business site. This will save you the hassle of recreating your site at some future date. Before I tell you where to get all this free stuff, let me give you a piece of advice. The Internet if mercurial. The most amazing site can be there one day and gone the next. Taking with it all that artwork that was perfect for your site. For this reason I suggest that when you come across a site with great artwork that you can use, first, bookmark it or put it in your Favorites folder. Then copy everything you may need right away. It will save you time and heartache down the road. Of the dozen sites where I found the artwork for my site, ten were gone within a year. Now, for all of those free sites you've been waiting for (Drum Roll!): Photographs * All Royalty Free (they have artwork too) - http://www.allroyaltyfree.co.uk/ * AltaVista Photo Finder (click on the images tab) - http://image.altavista.com/cgi-bin/avncgi * BigPhoto - http://www.bigfoto.com/ * Free Images - http://www.freeimages.co.uk/ * Free Stock Photos - http://www.freestockphotos.com/ * Free Stock Photos - http://free-stock-photos.com/ * FreeFoto.com - http://www.freefoto.com/index.jsp * Geek Philosopher - http://geekphilosopher.com/MainPage/photos.htm * Morguefile - http://www.morguefile.com/ * Picsearch - http://www.picsearch.com/ * Stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/ * Stockstash - http://www.stockstash.com/ * Yahoo! Picture Gallery - http://gallery.yahoo.com/ Artwork / Animation * 1,001 Free Fonts - http://www.1001freefonts.com/ * Animations ($7.95 for a week) - http://www.animations.com/en/index.mc * Aon Celtic Art - http://www.aon-celtic.com/cfreeware.html * Barry's Clipart Server - http://www.barrysclipart.com/ * Castletrash Clipart (medieval, Egyptian, fantasy clipart on CD's) - http://www.castletrash.com/index.htm * Clipart ($7.95 for a week) - http://www.clipart.com/en/index * CoolArchive - http://www.coolarchive.com/ * CoolText.com (create logos and other cool stuff) - http://www.cooltext.com/ * Crystal Cloud Graphics (spiritual graphics) - http://graphics.elysiumgates.com/ * Dinc! (Retro fonts and clipart) - http://www.girlswhowearglasses.com/info.html * Flash Components ($24.95 a month) - http://www.flashcomponents.com/ * FontFreak (fonts) - http://www.fontfreak.com/index2.htm * Free-Graphics - http://www.free-graphics.com/ * FreeGraphicLand.com (links to other graphics sites) - http://www.freegraphicland.com/ * Gif.com - http://www.gif.com/ * Graphics Hunter (links to other graphics sites) - http://www.graphicshunter.com/ * Homepage Tools - http://www.homepagetools.com/ * House Ravenscroft (Celtic images) - http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/3374/index.html * Rowan's Icons (Celtic images) - http://www.conjure.com/ICON/icons.html * Top20Free.com (links to 20 graphics sites) - http://www.top20free.com/ This should be enough links to keep you busy for a while. So have fun, spruce up your website, be sure not to use too many large graphics and read those 'Terms of Use.'
Lets face it, when a visitor does arrive it only follows that we should do our best to help them see the value in our website, no? Welcome new visitor, here is our feed, blah blah... Can't we do better then that?I see a lot of variations on the Welcome new visitor, here is our feed type of thing when I arrive at blogs and such these days. Sometimes this gets customized if the site determines that I am a "Googler" (visiting from a search engine) and then offers me some piece of text to try and make me become a passionate user of their site. This strategy never makes me a passionate user. What does work is when I read the page in question and then navigate around the site and find more great content. So the trick should be to make great-content discovery the goal. Welcome Googler, let us help you outHere we present one solution that works for helping people discover your site. As a side effect it will increase your pageviews in a proper, natural way. (We have a whole pile of other solutions for this, however that
What we have done is created a custom, on-the-fly navigation system based on their search query! This little widget should work to keep them poking around your site. Placement etc.We've been using this on several sites now (along with some other ideas alluded to above) and it works. Pageviews per user go up. Bounce rate falls (more on that in the future too). We have had to play with the placement of this box: top of the page? Floated to the right/left of the main page content? Following them down the page (with js)? As they say, your mileage may vary, but chances are you will get more mileage out of more readers, and that is a good sticky thing. Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 |
More Articles:1. Viewpoint on Usability It's a sad truth that very few Web integrators and interactive agencies have integrated performance engineers -- those folks who can analyze, assess, design and test Webb sites for usability -- into their overall work practices and methodologies. And even fewer have figured out how to apply performance engineering to the ever-changing and increasingly complex nature of web applications. This is anything but an intuitive process. SIs can't merely dot their offices with a few people (with or witho… 2. Ten Tips for Building an Ecom Web Site You've implemented online sales, now how to convince the customer to buy?Here are nine tips for building a site that encourages rather thandiscourages online shopping.10.Design for your target market. Find out who your potential customers areand why they come to your site. Use surveys, focus groups or usabilitystudies to discover their preferences, patterns and requirements.9. Identify your goals for the site and introduce content accordingly. OneInternet marketer tells the story of erroneously … 3. How To Select A Good Website Hosting Company I constantly encounter people that want me to design or update a website for them, and they are already signed up with a hosting company. The only problem is that many of these people should never have signed up with that particular hosting company. I'm dealing with a client now who is paying almost two and a half times more a month than she should, and the service the hosting company provides is substandard.I run into many problems with hosting companies, including:Prices being too high. I ofte… 4. Plan Your Web Site for Profits Most businesses fail to plan for online success. Knowing your purpose, audience, and uniqueness are the first steps to developing a successful web site. Follow these three steps to position your web site for Internet profits. Step 1: Determine Your Purpose The first step in planning a web site is to determine what you want to accomplish. Do you want to sell products and services, find new customers, establish credibility, or improve customer service?The purpose of your web site will affect its c… |
||||
