Everest Computers Blog About Computers and Web Design

For a web designer, the graphical aspect of a website is as important as textual. And sometimes the website’s colour palette, pictures and photographs used on a website tell more story and make a bigger impression on a visitor than the text. This is why it­ is so important to make the graphics right on the website.

In old days, I used to get the pictures and images from the libraries on CDs and DVDs. Remember an additional second Microsoft Office disk filled with images? Those days have long gone because now the Internet instead is filled with this sort of stuff and the only place to look for this stuff is the Internet. And there are plenty of places where the beautiful and - most importantly - useful pictures can be found.

The first place would be the stock photo websites, where the pictures cost money. The best one and the biggest one is iStockPhoto. They’ve got the biggest and in my view the best database of images and pictures on the web.

The next one is ShutterStock. They also have the big database and many original photos.

The third one if Fotolia. In comparison with iStockPhoto they have less quality images but I use them sometimes because their prices are much lower than those of iStockPhoto and ShutterStock.

And the last one I use is BrightQube. It stands from the rest by its design and an innovative way to search through the pictures.

There are plenty more stock photo websites and all of them can easily be found by typing “stock photo” in a search engine. These include the free ones and the paid ones - there are so many of them that I get confused - that’s why I decided to stick with four stock photo websites I have described above.

The other thing is that the same images can be found on multiple stock photo websites, which sometimes makes searching through many websites pretty timewasting and useless.

Apart from the dedicated stock photo websites, images, pictures, photographs and clipart can be found all over the web. The image search system I often check is Google Images and the website is Flickr. These are well-known to everyone. But remember that some images found here are copyrighted and cannot be used and copied without author’s permission.

This also relates to the images on Webshots and photoSIG websites because all photographs on these websites are private and cannot be used by other people without the prior agreement with the author.

For clipart, the best site is Clipart - as simple as that. They’ve got millions of pictures and you’re assured always to find one you’re searching for.

Concluding this list of the Internet graphics resources, I’d like to mention that if for some reason you cannot find what you’re looking for on the Internet and would like to be creative, it’s always possible to create your own graphics either by photographing what you need or by drawing it and then scanning it into a file. The best websites are done this way because the own pictures bring a personal touch to the website design, which is likely to be directly related to a person or a company or a family thus graphically empasizing the website’s belongness and its ownership. For example, photographs of your house or your town or pictures drawn by your children always make website nicer. Having the pictures of your own making on the website is not always a possibility but if it’s possible, I’d advice to have them there.