Where To Find Free Pictures, Artwork And Animation For Your Website
You've decided to have a website for yourself or your business.
Great! You know what you want to say, how you want it laid out,
what pages you need, and all the other good stuff that goes into
a great website. But what about graphics? Where do you get
buttons, banners, title art, photographs, animation, bars,
backgrounds and all the other things you need to make your
website look visually interesting?
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."
If making sites is your hobby, then launching one at low cost isn't that difficult. A cheap hosting site plan can be sought out for online. The web hosting companies have plans to accommodate nearly all sorts of customers, so getting web hosting services to fulfill your needs is very easy. At times instead of getting cheap web hosting, one can make and do with free web hosting as well, though the advantage with paid hosting is that mostly domain registration is free. To make a good web site design a web design degree can be taken. For convenient internet browsing a wireless internet should be subscribed.
