One of the trickier tasks in Web site development is collecting appropriate images to use on your Web site. Assuming you don't have a big graphics budget, you'll be doing some scrounging to come up with good material.

Don't steal images. Ah, there are so many sites out there with so many beautiful images. But they're not there for the picking. Although it's simple to download an image from someone else's Web site, you shouldn't do it, at least not for use on your own Web site.

There are three main sources of images:

• Copyrighted images you can get for free
• Copyrighted images you must buy
• Images that you create and own the copyright to

First, we'll explain a bit about copyrights. When you create something, you own it. No one else can use it unless they obtain permission to use it, or purchase rights to the item from you. Even though a site might not contain a copyright notice, assume that everything used on someone else's site is copyrighted. Whoever owns the site always owns all the words and all the images on the site (unless they stole the images -- or the text -- from someone else). This means that you risk legal problems, and sleepless nights, if you copy any part of the site.

Freebies

So what can you do if you're a terrible artist but you still want to jazz up your site with pretty pictures?

Most word processors, desktop publishing software, and image processing software applications come with a wide variety of free images. In Microsoft Word, for example, click Insert > Picture > Clip Art. Use the Microsoft Clip Art Organizer, shown in Figure 2-8, to organize all the clip art, pictures, sounds, and videos on your computer into one collection for easy viewing and selecting.

Figure 2-8: Clip Art Organizer helps you organize pictures and media files.

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Royalty-Free Artwork

Another option is to use royalty-free artwork. A royalty is the fee you pay the owner of a copyright to use the copyrighted item, each time you use it. Royalty-free means that instead of having to pay a fee each time you use the image, you can pay a flat fee once, and be able to use the image repeatedly. There are two ways to get images royalty-free:

• You can purchase CD-ROMs that contain thousands of royalty-free images. Check out your local, large office supply stores to see what's available. Be sure to check for legal notices on those CDs. There may be limits on what you can use the image for -- for example, use may be limited to schools and non-profit organizations.
• There are a bunch of places on the Web to download royalty-free art, for a fee. One of the best values is iStockphoto. You should also visit the GettyImages, Corbis, and Clipart.com Web sites. Or you can google royalty free art, copyright free art, or simply free art.

No matter where you buy get your artwork and images, make sure you read the fine print and the restrictions on use. Most royalty free work is available for use on a public Web site but sometimes they restrict use on business or e-commerce sites.

To Clip Art or Not to Clip Art

Clip art is a mixed blessing. You'll find lots of it on the Web or on inexpensive CDs, and you'll probably find images that express the idea you want to get across with your Web site. The trouble is that clip art images are simple line drawings, and as such they don't always convey the professional message a site designer needs.

When considering clip art, look at a lot of it before you make a choice. Pick the best images that express the ideas you want, and be careful not to overuse clip art, or any kind of graphics, on your site. Discretion in the use of graphics prevents your page from looking cluttered.

Why Use Photographs Rather than Clip Art?

Although a great deal of the royalty-free images available on the Web consists of clip art, there are also many photographs and other high-quality images on the Web, particularly through iStockphotos, GettyImages, and Corbis. Because photographs usually look better than clip art, it's worth considering these images for your Web pages.

On the downside, photos almost always require more disk space than clip art images do. This means that pages containing photographs usually take longer to download than pages with clip art -- especially if you use multiple photos on a page. That's not a fatal problem by any means, because more people are switching to broadband, which means download times are less of an issue. You can easily compress photographic images (and clip art, too). You'll learn about these techniques in Lesson 3.

If you've got a camera and a good eye, you can forgo searching for images altogether. In the next section, you'll learn how to create your own images.