Graphics

Websites always look better with pictures on them. Text is hard to read if it isn't broken up, so adding a few well chosen pictures can add hugely to the effectiveness of your site.

Just look at how boring this page looks without any pictures!

You can also add alt and title attributes to your images, which is particularly good for the seo of your pages.

Graphical Headers (the image/logo section that many websites show right at the top of the page - the 'thumbs up' section at the top of this page, for example) are another way of making your site look more inviting and in many cases, more professional.

Creating graphics for you pages is not difficult, but it can be time consuming. And tricky if you don't know what you are doing.

I don't recommend many graphical programs. The ones I use myself tend to be open source (The Gimp) or very old (Paint Shop Pro 7). So far those two programs have been able to do everything I've wanted to do grapically. I don't recommed spending a fortune of some of the whizzy graphics tools unless you have deep pockets and know exactly what you are doing - and already have a real need for such power.

The only drawback to using dedicated graphic programs is that there is always a steep learning curve. Not one of them is point-and-click simple because they all have way more features than you are ever likely to need. And even when you do know what you are doing, creating a graphics file can still be quite time-consuming.

The absolute best solution that I've found is a special program that has been created to make graphical headers for websites, literally at the click of a button. Website Header Wizard is so simple to use that the instructions are not needed. Just follow the simple steps and a great, professional graphical header will be ready in minutes. Or less.

As for sourcing pictures to use on my websites I tend to use a photo library called iStockPhoto, which has hundreds of thousands of excellent picture on all kinds of subjects. It is easy to find just what you want and the cost of each image, for use on websites, is just $1 per download.