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Using graphic images on your website can help you make your site much more visually appealing, while poor images can actually drive traffic away from your site. However if you use too many images or your images are too large they can slow down your website considerably. Not everyone is on broadband so you can loose your potential website traffic because your site did not become visible within 10 seconds and your visitors clicked away.
You may also want to use images you choose yourself in your promotional marketing campaigns. There are sites with free images but the images may or may not be of the best quality, may not reflect what you want and certainly will not be large enough or of high enough quality (>=300dpi) to be able to use in brochures.
So where can you get good images to use:
Fotolia Provide thousands of high quality images you can purchase in several resolutions. It’s quite simple. You register to obtain your own login information then you can buy credits in batches of 10 at a rate of about $10 ($1 each).
The smallest images are about 7.5 x 10cm and cost 1 credit while you can also buy supersite images for several credits which you can use in marketing campaigns, posters etc. For website use you will probably never need to use more than 2 credits for an image.
Having obtained your images, you may need to edit them or reduce the size, make them brighter etc. An excellent free tool you can use to edit your images is Irfanview (named after its inventor) which is easy to download, install and use.
You can also add extra filters
Things you can do in Irfanview include:
• Add borders
• Sharpen
• Resize (bigger or smaller)
• Crop (Cut away portions)
• Swap the colors e.g. change blue to red
• Apply special filters (you need to try it to understand)
• Convert to a different format.
And many other things
Visit Irfanview and download a copy for free.
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