Archive for May, 2009

To illustrate a web site, it is often useful to have access to a photo library. Most of the Internet-based photo stocks are fairly cheap, but you can do better with some totally free photo libraries.

• The Smithsonian Institution : large-size images, of mostly historical interest.
• George Eastman House Museum : black-and-white and very brightly colored picutres covering most of the XXth Century.
• The Library of Congress : First-class historical photos, including protraits of American Presidents and collections of very famous images – but size may be limited.
• The New York Public Library : Less striking than most of the others, but very deep list.
• NASA exposes huge stacks of space and sceicen photos.

Source: Photojojo.com, via YLovePhoto.com.

photo credit: Gaetan Lee

Advertising is a great way to produce a revenue stream out of the visits to your web site, even with a relatively small traffic. But more is not better. Too many ads will shy visitors away and will hide your own content (The real reason visitors come and see your site).

It is a good thing that Google limit publishers to a maximum of 3 ads per page, but they also have good statistics and, if you use ‘channels’, you will be able to detect the most efficient ad locations and ad types. Try several, and keep only a few, the most productive ones. And if Google is more productive than an affiliate program, keep only the best.

When a visitor arrives on a page that does not exist (or not any more, or not yet), a customized error-404 page should be doing a lot to help her. Write such a customized 404 page with -at least- a few indications about how to browse your site (a site map, maybe) and a search engine.

Recommended by A Photo Editor, here is a list of cheap web hosting offers that are well targetted for photographers (users that usually need a lot of web space).

BlueHost $7/month
GoDaddy $5 – $15/month
Oditech $10/month
Yahoo Small Business $10/month
DreamHost $10/month
Tiger Tech $7/month
Site 5 $8/month
NearlyFreeSpeech Pay as you go
HostSite $10/month
ICD Soft $6-10/month
Certified Hosting $5/month
Host Papa $5/month
PowWeb $8/month
HostGator $15/month
WebHero $7/month
LaughingSquid $8 – $14/month
Pair $10 – $30/month
SurpassHosting $4 – $15/month
Eleven2 $6 – $21/month — Maybe not good. A commenter is having serious problems.
LiquidWeb $15 – $25/month

I am not sure this is a necessity, but it may become very useful when designing a web site layout: 960 Gridder uses a Javascript extension to offer the possibility of aligning a kind of grid on your web site in order to help identify the exact position of elements.

You don’t know it before you try, but many visitors arriving on your web site do not find immediately what they are loking for. It may be that Google did not direct them perfectly or that they remember seeing something useuful and they can’t find it anymore. So you need to help them.

Let me offer two good options:

1. If your web site software integrates a search engine, like WordPress, use it.


2. In any case, you can easily setup a Google AdSense account and -on top of the advertising capacity- you will get access to their search engine for your web site.

Again, there are plenty of plugins to help and you may want to moderate tightly. But this will track the real activity on your blog, even if it happens on old articles long gone from the front page.