The web is filled with thousands of sites to find and refine images for building your website. These include animated gifs, backgrounds, various images used in websites such as buttons, bars, and logos. Very often, image sites will offer a number of their images for free to entice webmasters to frequent their site, and then charge for the premium services. We encourage you to visit a number of these websites. You can get a feel for the quality of images available to webmasters and whether it makes sense to take the next step and join one or more of the premium services.

Please review copyright laws before assuming that you can use whatever you find on the net without explicit permission. Two other links which you should take the time to check out are the Animated Gif Artists' Guild which takes you through several false assumptions, and ZdNet's article on direct linking and the many problems involved with it.

Also check out our Fine Tuning section for links to web companies that are able to shrink the file size of the images on your site without altering their appearance. Such a service can be important if you want your site to contain many images, since it can greatly decrease the download time for your visitors. Studies have shown that after a mere 10 seconds, visitors are thinking about clicking elsewhere.

Images

A couple of free sites to start looking for images are:

• Virtually Ignorant's Free Background Images
• Virtually Ignorant's Free Button Images
• Virtually Ignorant's Free bullet images
• Virtually Ignorant's Free horizontal line images
• Free clip-art
• Free graphicland
• Free Clip-art net

And when you're tired of surfing the free sites and spending far too much time finding graphics, treat yourself to a clipart CD! Really, we've found that a couple of good CD's save you a whole lot of surfing frustration. We own and recommend the CD's from the Animation Factory for having a quick bunch of graphics to use by your keyboard. When you buy the CD, you also get complimentary access to their member's section which has great resources, and on-line editing capacity. Click here for more information and to order.

A source of really inexpensive clipart CD's is Bruderbund.com. YYou can find clipart CD's from as little as $6.99! So check out some of these titles:

1. Web Clip Collection(tm) 25,000 -- $6.99 Compilation of over 25,000 fast loading, Web specific clips. All are ready-to-use with point and click ease; royalty free and copyright cleared. With over 50 styles to choose from there's something for every taste and style imaginable. Plus, you'll find a powerful browser that makes searching for a specific image or jump-starting ideas easy.
2. ClickArtŪ 400,000 -- at $29.99 package of400,000 premium graphics, fine art images, photos and more. If design is your passion, you've got a reason to choose ClickArtŪ 400,000.
3. ClickArtŪ 250,000 -- Only $9.99! 250,000 premium graphics, fine art images, photos and more.

Backgrounds by Marie has many free backgrounds available. She also offers you the option of buying a set which will then be removed from the site and no longer offered publicly. Also check out her triple background script which will allow you to choose three backgrounds and produce the HTML to make it a triple frame around your content.

Windy's Design Studio has backgrounds, buttons, and other graphics available for free. Windy also has tips from her vast experience as a professional web designer.

Image program

One of our favorite free programs is Irfan View, a very small, very fast program for viewing images and making minor alterations. Joe Barta also recommends it in his PageTutor. It also has a great little thumbnail function. You can download Irfan View directly.

Click on the thumbnail to see a screenshot.

We mention on our Banners and Link Exchange page a nifty little free banner making program. You can actually use it to make other animated gifs, or even non-animated gifs as well. Download Banner Crafter free.

Another good place to pick up good clipart, webart, and web graphic CD's is Amazon.com.

• Free Background Images
• Free Button images
• Free bullet images
• Free horizontal line images
• JPEGCruncher Free JPEG Optimizer
• GIFCruncher Free GIF Optimizer
• Download Banner Crafter free
• Irfan View -- free image viewer.

Icon Design : Graphic Icons in Computer Interface Design


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