Bally Chohan Vision
The word free makes many people skeptical. You may be wondering what’s the catch, so before I tell you about some free hosting sites on the Web, let me tell you what you can expect from them.
First, you’ll face many design limitations. You can’t just upload your own Web site to their server as you can with a commercial service provider. Instead, you’re generally limited to using the templates and designs provided by the free site. So the first thing you give up is design control and options.
Second, you’ll be limited in the size of your site and the amount of bandwidth you can use. If you want to put lots of big photos online, you may quickly run out of space or exceed the bandwidth limitations. When that happens, your viewers might be greeted with an error message instead of your pages.
And finally, you’ll have to share your pages with advertising — that’s the real catch. These free sites make money by selling advertising that they display across the pages they host, and you won’t have any control over the ads that may appear on your pages. Across the top of your family Web site, you may find a car ad one day and an ad for diet pills or an online gambling site the next day.
If you don’t mind these limitations or think they’re worth it because the price is right, keep reading. Just remember, Web site hosting can cost as little as $5 per month, so you may not be saving much with a free site. (Also beware of bait-and-switch tricks. Many of these sites try to attract users with free server space and then sell premium services for a fee. Before you pay for these added services, shop around. You may find comparable services for a much better price elsewhere.)
The following services provide free, basic Web hosting services:
Yahoo! Geocities (www.geocities.com): This popular one-stop solution to e-mail and Web page hosting also provides PageBuilder, PageWizard, and SiteWizard. These programs enable you to use basic click-and-drag techniques to arrange your photos and text, and provide some simple templates into which you can insert your content.
Angelfire (www.angelfire.com): Especially popular among young people, Angelfire, shown in Figure 4-5, offers free, basic Web site hosting, if you don’t mind sharing your pages with their advertisers. Owned and operated by Terra-Lycos, this site features a variety of other options (prices vary by service), including a blogging program, as well as premium services that let you store up to 100MB of images and MP3 music files. (If you want to know more about blogging, see Chapter 15.)
Tripod (www.tripod.com): Also owned by Terra-Lycos, Tripod is designed to reach a more mature market than Angelfire, but it features a similar suite of options, including basic Web site hosting for free (with ads), and the option to upgrade to more advanced services, such as their blogging software, for a fee.
This part is all about making sure you have the best-looking images on your Web pages while ensuring that they download quickly for your visitors. In Chapter 5, I show you where to find premade images, such as clip art and royalty-free photos, and how to download images from the Internet. You also find out how to retrieve photos from a digital camera and how to scan photos, drawings, and anything else you can fit on a scanner.
In Chapter 6, you find an introduction to Photoshop Elements 3 and discover how to crop, reduce, and edit images, as well as how to optimize them so they download as fast as possible. In Chapter 7, you discover the advanced features in Adobe Elements that help you keep track of all your images and automatically create a photo album or image gallery for your Web site.
What would your family Web site be without pictures? Adding images, such as vacation photos and old family portraits, can make your Web site more attractive and bring family stories to life. But how do you get those great images on your computer so you can add them to your Web site? Consider scanning your children’s artwork and keepsakes, as well as the great prints you’ve taken over the years. And if that’s not enough, add clip art and royalty-free photos (professional pictures can enhance the overall look of your site and compliment your snapshots).
In this chapter, you discover how to download images from Web sites through a browser, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, and where to purchase clip art and photos on CDs. You also find out how to scan printed materials, such as artwork and photos, with Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and a scanner, and retrieve images from a digital camera. In Chapter 6 you find an introduction to editing photos and preparing them for the Web, and in Chapter 7 you find tips for organizing images and using Elements 3 to create Web photo galleries and photo album pages.
Click! Using Images You Find Online
So you’ve surfed to a site that has an image on it that you’d love to use on your Web site. Maybe it’s a still image from your favorite movie, or a photo of the Sydney Opera House, which is exciting for you because your family went to Australia last year. Maybe it’s a picture of a cartoon character that bears a strong resemblance to your spouse. Whatever the image and whatever your reason for wanting to use it, can you just grab it from the Web site and use it on your site? Well, although it’s technically possible to save the image to your hard drive, it may not be legal to use it.
Before I show you how to download images from the Web I have to include a little legal disclaimer. When you publish something on the Internet, you are in the same category as publishers who produce books or magazines. That means you have the same legal obligations to respect copyright. Be careful not to copy images or graphics from other people’s Web sites without asking permission. You find a few guidelines about copyrighted material in the following section.
How do you know what you can and can’t use? Most commercial photos, taken by professional photographers or journalists, are copyrighted. When an image is copyrighted, the person who owns the rights has the right to determine who can use it. Generally, you need to either purchase the right to use a photo or obtain written permission. Simply giving credit to the photographer by name or citing the source of the image is usually not enough.
The same goes for cartoons, drawings, artwork, and clippings from newspapers and magazines. For example, scanning a greeting card and using the image on your Web site would almost surely violate the copyright of the greeting card company.
The exceptions? Images you find on Web sites that offer copyright-free images, images you purchase with the expressed right to reuse the images, and images that are considered public domain, such as vintage photos where the original photographer is unknown or where the subject of the photo is a person, place, or thing that’s considered public property. For example, you can find many freely available photos of the Statue of Liberty, presidents, Mount Rushmore, and other common subjects.
So, now that the attorneys are happy, here are the steps to follow if you do have the right to use an image and want to copy it from a Web site:
- In a Web browser, open the Web page containing the image you want. A pop-up menu appears, as shown in Figure 5-1.
- Place your cursor directly over the image and right-click (in Windows) or click and hold (on the Mac).
3. Choose Save Picture As from the drop-down menu. The Save Picture dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 5-2.
- If you want, type a new name in the File name box.
- Click Save.
You can change the name of an image file when you save it to your hard drive.
Bally Finding royalty-free images and clip art online
If you’re looking for a specific image, such as a drawing of a duck for a baby site, try an online search (for example, type ducks + free clip art in Google). You can find an extraordinary amount of free images on the Web, but you often get what you pay for.
If you’re willing to invest a little in quality images, I recommend the following. Some of these sites provide free images, but most charge a usage fee, especially for the highest quality images.
Most of the sites listed here offer the same images at high, medium, and low resolution, and some charge more for the highest resolution. When you’re talking about images, resolution refers to the amount of detail in an image. The higher the resolution, the bigger the file size and the better the quality of the image. As a general rule, you’ll want high-resolution images only if you plan to print them (especially if you want to make large prints). On the Web, low resolution is preferred because the file size is smaller and the file downloads faster.
Most image sites enable you to search through photos and other graphics by keyword (for example, you could search for photos of Paris to find professional photos to complement your travel pictures). Some of these sites also have images organized in categories you can browse. All these sites make it easy to download pictures immediately:
Public Domain Images (www.pdimages.com): As the name implies, this site provides access to a wide range of images considered to be in the public domain because the photographer is either unknown or has relinquished the copyright. Although they do charge for some of the images on this site, many are available for free.
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Getty Images, Inc. (www.gettyimages.com): Getty Images is the largest supplier of royalty-free digital imagery on the Web, specializing in photographs and illustrations of a wide variety of subjects, including film footage. Pay for images and footage as you go.
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Stockbyte (www.stockbyte.com): Stockbyte is a great source for international royalty-free photos. You can purchase photographs at a high or low resolution.
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Photos.com (www.photos.com): Photos.com is a subscription-based service for royalty-free stock photography and photo objects. A 1- to 12month subscription gives you unlimited access and use of its collection.
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ImageSource (www.imagesource.com): You can register on this site for free and search through a vast array of professional photos, paying only for what you select to download.
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Clipart Connection (www.clipartconnection.com): A great source for free clip art and animations designed for the Web.
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Clipart.com (www.clipart.com): This subscription-based site boasts the largest collection of clip art on the Web, but you have to pay a weekly, monthly, or annual fee.
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Web Promotion (www.webpromotion.com): A great source for animated GIFs and other Web graphics. Artwork on this site is free.