LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Startup Business School
2. Alternative Energy Store
3. Tony Yoo's Protolize

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : Aloe Living

Buying the right stock photo

Your site is ready for a face-lift and you’re looking for the right images to use. You’re also looking to print something consistent with your web site so your image looks solid and established. Here is where a stock-photography site comes in handy. But there are thousands out there …

There are differences in the quality of the pictures, prices, photo licensing between those sites and you can buy photos for web-only use, print, multimedia, personal .. Read the license agreements carefully before buying, especially if it’s a model picture (a human face is visible). You save if you get a subscription for the time required to build your site (if you are buying a large number of pictures) otherwise, sites like Fotolia are perfect for one-picture downloads.

The best way to look at photos is if they’re royalty free as you may usually use them in prints, web sites, multimedia presentations, for business communication, decoration and even personal use (you may print your photo wallpaper). Most sites provide this type of licence with subtle flavours to it so make sure you read the license agreement before you put up that huge banner on Champs-Elysées.

Determine how many pictures you need before you buy to decide between a bundle and a unit price.

Are you ready to use them? You can only use one image for a certain number of prints (a fair number provided in the license agreement) and you can not resell photos or templates using those photos. You may play with photoshop and alter an image, without gaining the copyright to it though but this is what I call wasted money, meaning that if you buy something, it should be what you need and should not require further alteration (that is not true for dresses, they always require alteration, believe me, I learn from watching … ).

What does royalty-free mean for the buyer? Most stock sites provide that type of license. It’s important to determine the right license you need and royalty-free gives you unlimited use of a photo in any media, you pay for the image only once and use it as many times as you need. This is the most permissive license ad you should look for that as your business may grow and you should save printing more copies of your materials. Right-managed photos need a special setup and environment to live in as well as a more refined targeting of the audience and are usually more expensive and may include brand names (models, companies, trademarks) .

No matter what license you acquired, you can not resell the photo you bought. If you buy a template from Bynapse (my web templates shop) you may use it, you even get stock photos and logos or clipart for free, but it’s the same story... You cannot claim copyright to the images and you can not resell them. Nor you can resell the template containing the images.

Now there is such a case where you buy the rights for an image (for the right price, of course) but you can become the owner and the photographer loses the right to use or sell the photo ever again. Fotolia is an example of a stock agency that sells image rights. It’s all about finding the right image for your needs and buying the setup, the environment and the colors that put you up in front and keeps you there.
Apple is an example of a company that does everything beautiful and stylish and look at it grow. Vista looks sleek and design gets better all the time.

Web 2.0 is all about using the right colors, images and message and if you have designs you want to discuss or you just want people to see, post them here and let’s talk.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Mufon.com
2. Bionic Woman
3. Sci Fi Universe

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at Bynapse.com - the easy web.

Reciprocal link of the week : Pogo Cheats

Little search box

The neat search box at the top of that sleek looking Web 2.0 style site you just visited looks good? Well, you can have it too, tailored to your desires.

The ability to perform an easy and efficient search seems to be the main ingredient and the greatest achievement nowadays and Web 2.0 style sites are all including it. Tailoring search results and harvesting a powerful search engine’s capabilities to extract relevant information and present fast results is a requirement all main search engines respond to.

Of course you’re not keen to see your competition on the results or in the ads displayed on the result pages (that happens if you’re not running a blog, like me, in which case I welcome all pertinent info to show up). You may not want to see any ads at all in the results (that comes for a cost, no matter if you use msn, Yahoo or Google to power your search). Display the ads and you get a free way to monetize the searches initiated from your site. Needless to say that you can restrict the search results to your web site or web presence (suite of web sites) or, you may just favor them in the results … sneaky

Here are a few links to such pages providing easy access to custom (to you) search engines. Just follow their instruction to get what you are looking for and know that you can modify the appearance and fully integrate at a later time, you don’t need to start Google size.

• Live Search Box - http://search.live.com/siteowner (this is Microsoft’s answer, really easy to follow guides, a bit slow for my taste). Nathan Buggia has a blog entry covering the basics, read it here.
• Google Coop - http://www.google.com/coop/cse (this one is Google’s solution, so easy and fast but for business use it costs $. I really like free stuff)
• Yahoo Search Builder - http://builder.search.yahoo.com (Yahoo, good, personalizable search results and powerful search analysis tools. Not as customizable or friendly as the previous two)
• Crafty Search - http://www.gonecountrygraphics.com/craftysearchbox.html (sooo easy, straightforward, unreal, sooo limited results though, I’ve put this here because it’s so easy to integrate though)
• Ixquick Search - http://us.ixquick.com/eng/link_instructions.html (easy to integrare and customize, real results coming back)
• Pico Search - http://www.picosearch.com/ (easy enough, I’m not yet convinced about the accuracy of the results, to be discussed)

Know that all search engines provide the results as XML as well, free or for a fee, so you can go all the way and have the results display in your own page, simply by consuming the XML dataset returned. Now you don’t need to know what XML is unless you’re a developer and you should better start reading up on it now.

Next week we shall talk about stock photos: who’s cheapest, why buy and how to do it or why not start selling too.