Prettifying your website and posts with Flickr

I get a lot of people asking me how those big, professionally designed websites always manage to have such great pictures. Whether its a picture to go with a blog post, or a background image, or an image for an ad, it can be a real trial getting a suitable, high quality image. Well, it's difficult unless you know how.

The trick is to find a resource that allows you to use other people's images without having to pay for it - or at least, without having to pay much for it. There are plenty of sites out there, such as iStockPhoto that can provide professional photos and illustrations for a fee, and there are plenty that offer poor quality pictures for free - neither of which really help the budding webmaster aiming to make the new site as visually appealing as possible.

Flickr is a well known and widely used photo sharing website that houses a mind numbing range of photographs. Not all are good, but many are. What's neat about Flickr is that a lot of the photos are taken by amateur photographers who aren't necessarily trying to make a living from them. These photos are often licenced under the creative commons licence (the particular one we are interested in is the attribution / non-commercial licence), which allows for redistribution and sharing of images with some restrictions.

The attribution/non-commercial licence basically gives you the right to post the photo or image to your website, provided you attribute that work to the owner/author. The non-commercial part states that you cannot use the work for commercial purposes - i.e. you shouldn't be making money out from the image. For the vast majority of websites, this licence is perfectly suitable. When in doubt, you can contact Flickr or read their FAQs on the matter.

Incidentally, the image in this posting was taken from Flickr and if you hover your mouse over it you will see the attribution given in the Alt or Title text, depending on your browser.