Look good online
We all know that an image says more than a thousand words and therefore imagery is an important aspect of any website. But what do you do if you don’t have access to a brilliant photographer and don’t have the know-how to take great photos yourself or don’t have the tools to edit your imagery. Luckily the internet is a great resource, and it doesn’t have to cost a thing. Below we take a look at what to do when looking for and creating images for websites.
Image editing tools
If you want to take your own images but don’t have any editing tools, and don’t feel like spending hundreds of pounds on editing software, there are some great free tools out there for you to use.
Pixlr.com is like a slim version of photoshop, but your best option if you don’t want to spend the money, but still want more than just cropping and filters.
If you’d rather just play around with filters and some very simple editing Picmonkey is a great online tool. Although you need to pay for the pro-features, the basic features might prove to be enough.
Finally, if you want to overlay your images with text and simple graphics go to Canva.com.
Where to find the images
So what do you do when you don’t have any images to edit to begin with. The easiest, but also the most costly way of doing it would be to sign up for one of the many stockphoto libraries out there, such as Istock, Shutterstock and Getty Images.
If you’d rather use free images there are some libraries out there that offers just that. The Stocks is a great resource, especially for nature and atmospheric images. You can also turn to Flickr for images under the Creative Commons licence.
Image size
A big image can seriously slow down the load time of your website, which in the best case scenario will leave your visitors a bit annoyed, in the worst case scenario will send them running for the hills. The first step is to not upload bigger images than you need, but if you want to make the file size even smaller you can use a site such as tinypng.com which compresses your images, without compromising the quality of the image.
Some of the legal stuff
As mentioned above you can find images under the Creative Commons licence on Flickr, just remember to select the Commercial Use allowed option. Also, the Creative Commons licence often comes with a few restrictions so read the small print before you use someone’s image. In some cases you have to be sure that you mention who the photographer is and where you found the image.
Also be very cautious when it comes to using images of children that comes from free resources, as you can’t be sure that the children’s parents have consented to having these images freely distributed across the web. If in doubt, turn to some of the paid options – it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
And finally, even though you probably already know this, but just for good measure – never take images off someone else’s website unless they’ve stated that it’s okay for others to use the images.