Web design plays a very important role online. It is the essence of presentation and it gives a first impression to online visitors. The evolution of web design is fast and innovative approaches are being done in able to meet the visual and interactive demands of the modern internet generation.
Presentation and layouts are important in an effective web design. The most important piece in any presentation is, of course, an image or photo. Worth a thousand words, a single photo can easily enhance the visual experience of the web page. Extra resources. However, you shouldn’t just use photos carelessly. Using too many or inappropriate images unrelated with your theme and subject may instantly leave a bad impression.
To make a good web design, you need to at least have some artistic sense. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be good photographer or artist in able to create your own content, but you need to at least use that sense to discern and select images or photos that would be perfect for your web page.
The Internet for your Webdesign Photo needs
With the internet as a vast source for all your webdesign needs, you can obtain a virtually infinite amount of stock images and photos that you could use for your web page. With today’s digital era, there are a whole lot of photos being converted in digital format because of the convenience of digital editing the popularity of online social media. Because of this, more photos are being shared and even uploaded with the intent of providing other people benefit from using them – some of which may require some payment if to be used for personal or commercial gain.
There are two kinds of photos you can obtain from the internet: the free photos and the paid stock photos.
The advantage of free photos, aside from the fact that they’re free, is that they are readily available and may or may not need further consent. However, please observe proper online etiquette by at least giving credit to the original provider or owner. If the image belongs to the public domain, then it is considered it doesn’t belong to anyone.
Paid stock photos are photos you can only obtain by means of payment – either thru a site’s credit system or direct payment (mostly via credit cards or paypal). Paid stock photos are mostly sought for their quality. Unlike free photos that have fixed or low resolution, paid stock photos have a variety of resolution to choose from depending on your choice or your budget. Furthermore, paid stock photos will ease your conscience if you worry about using and benefitting from someone else’s photos in case you’re worried about that.
About Stock Photo Licenses
Most paid stock photos obtained from the internet are free from copyright restrictions or are licensed under creative commons public domain dedication. This means you will be able to copy, modify, and distribute the work for personal and commercial purposes without asking permission. However, as previously mentioned, some of the photos may require dedication – this includes paid stock photos as well.
Cheap Stock Photo Libraries
Now that you have some ideas regarding licenses involved in stock photos and images, let us proceed with the list of great photos libraries with cheap stock photos for webdesign . The following list will help remedy that struggle on finding the perfect images you would want to use for your latest projects.
- Veer – is a photo library with millions of images in its archives. Veer features a variety of royalty-free stock photos, vectors, fonts, and other content that would suit your creativity. Veer also has a community of fellow creative members to share ideas and interact with.
- Corbis – is a worldwide creative resource for web designers. It is a site that offers comprehensive selection of stock photography, illustrations, videos, and other content. With its easy to navigate feature, it’s a user-friendly site for those who want to get straight-to-the-point in finding stock photos immediately.
- Fotolia – offers affordable stock images amounting to millions of royalty-free images, vectors, illustrations, video clips, and other creative content. As a popular stock image sites, it has a crowdsourced library and all images are royalty-free that allows their use for any design project or document without restrictions such as time limit or number of allowable prints.
- Morguefile – offers both free and cheap stock high resolution photos. Aside from an easy to use keyword search tool, you can share opinions and like/share the image in an ala social media fashion. What’s even more interesting is that you can even edit photos before downloading them thanks to the built-in crop tool allowing you to save certain parts of the image you’re only interested in.
- iStock – uses their own iStock credit system sold in preset packages to allow users to purchase affordable royalty-free stock photos and images. Just like other photo libraries, they have a simple search feature and also allow search results to be categorized for the convenience of the user.
- Shutterstock – is among the most popular photo libraries with several millions royalty-free stock photos. The site is updated daily with more than 20,000 images thanks to its bustling community. With a large library of cheap stock photos for webdesign and a lot of fresh batch of photos daily, you’re sure to find something you will really need for that project you’re working on.
- Bigstock – has several millions of royalty-free stock images to choose from. Although their pay-as-you-go-system has been replaced by a subscription system, but they still offer the subscription fees at a considerably cheap price.