PERSONAL IMAGES VERSUS PROFESSIONAL

Unless your own photos are of professional grade, you may be better off buying online stock photos:

• For some businesses, showing only your own photos of your product or services can be effective. However, unless your photos look professional, they may be more of a detriment in some cases than a benefit.
• We highly recommend using stock photos for special type of "display" images, such as banner images and such.
• We do however recommend a photo gallery to display photos of your specvific products or services, so that viewers still see what you do, but it doesn't deter from the overall effectiveness of your website.

BEWARE OF COPYRIGHTED IMAGES

Images displayed on Google and other search engines:

• One of the biggest mistakes many people make is to think that just because an image is on Google, Bing and other search engines, it is ok to use them in your website or social media pages.
• Google and the other search engines simply pick up all images from existing websites and place them in their inventory.
• There is no indication of whether they are copyrighted or not.

"Royalty Free" versus " free"

• Although there are still some sites offering free images, those are becoming harder and harder to find.
• When you Google "free images", you will see lots of listings that take you to their websites where the images are NOT free, but they are usually royalty free.
• Royalties are recurring fees where the original owner of the image will be paid every time someone uses that image.
• Most images available on Stock Photo websites are Royalty Free, which means they have the right to sell those images to the general public.

Stock Photo Websites

• There are lots of websites offering great quality stock photos, although prices vary greatly from site to site.
• The quality of the image usually makes the purchase worthwhile, because a professional looking image on your website will help attract your potential clientele.
• Once again things on the internet are never straightforward! When choosing pictures on stock photo sites, you need to know where the images will be used on your website in order to determine the size of picture you need. Many stock photo sites charge different prices for different sizes of images.

Affordable Web Design Ltd and its affiliates such as Affordable Calgary Web team members help our clients find the best images for their website, keeping all the different factors in mind when doing so. There is no additional fee for this service as long as that the number of photos or videos doesn't substantially add to the overall project timeframe.

VIDEOS

There are lots of factors to keep in mind when you want to add video to your website:

• Because videos add very large file sizes to your website, you run the risk of making your page slow when a viewer is opening it up.
• The best solution to this problem has been to upload your videos to sites that are geared specifically to video, such as You Tube and Vimeo.
• These platforms generate code that can be put into your website to make it look like the video is on your site, but doesn't affect the page download speed.
• There are also many videos available through online Stock Photo websites, although they can be rather costly and you also need to be careful of file sizes.