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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, clip art, 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 clip art books; some include all of the images on a CD too. I have several from Dover Publications that have great stuff in them. Clip art 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

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."

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