December 2, 2007...7:50 pm
How to Improve Your Website for Only $1
Great photography! That’s one sure fire way to improve the first impression of your web site. Of course, in the long-term you have to focus on quality content and delivering what your readers want rather than just the immediate impact that photography can deliver. But no one can dispute that a great picture can lift the quality of any web page.
When I started out as a web designer in 1999, stock photography was much more expensive that it is nowadays. I would usually budget £60 per photograph and therefore it had to be part of the proposal process as the cost of stock photography could soon mount up.
A few years ago a new company called iStockPhoto came along and blew that business model out of the water, by charging only one US dollar per picture. This now means that you barely have to consider stock photography as a cost factor when designing web sites. Commissioning bespoke photography is of course an entirely different ball game, but the majority of web design uses stock images.
iStockPhoto’s inventory is huge and wide ranging and it differs from other libraries like Getty because any one with a digital camera has the opportunity to contribute to the site. Your work does have to be scrutinised and approved by picture editors, but if you can produce photographs of sufficient quality then you can upload and sell your work. There are three great benefits of being a member of iStockPhoto.
- Top quality photography, illustration, flash files and video for only $1
- Free weekly photo and free video
- The opportunity to place your own work online and earn a commission on sales
To buy photographs, you buy a batch of credits (at the moment minimum 13) for $1 each. The more credits you buy, the cheaper the cost of the credits. Depending on the size of the image you require, some may cost more than $1, but for use on a web site, most of the time, the $1 size and resolution is sufficient.
The current weakness of the dollar against most currencies means that the real cost of stock photography has gone down even further. Not such great news for those in Europe selling their work on iStockPhoto, but the range of this company’s contributors is truly global and this will ensure that new work in contributed all the time.
So if you’re a web site owner or a budding web designer sign up for for iStockPhoto, download some free images and find some great pictures that will help separate your web site from the competition.
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