Photo Galleries

Photographs are a great way of making your beginners website more interesting, and are also a very good way to enable search engines to find you. By using the alternate text field you can enter a term that the search engine will look for. A photo rich site will find a large number of visitors come from doing an image search on Google.

If you take your own photographs beware that it is very difficult to stop others using them. A watermark or copyright statement on the picture itself may make the message clear, but it also may destroy the image you wanted to show. You should put a copyright statement on each of the pages of your site to remind people that the pictures are protected by law and the right to use them belongs to you.

If you decide you want to have photographs on your new website remember that all material on the internet belongs to somebody, and that you should not use someone elses picture without asking their permission. And never, never try to pass off a photo as something it is not! If you use a photo without understanding the copyright position you may find yourself in trouble. Some hosting companies remove sites that infringe copyright!

Photographs can demonstrate very clearly something that is difficult to explain by just using text, and can make an article more interesting. The use of pictures and photographs should be considered carefully. One of the best ways of understanding whether photographs, pictures of diagrams have a place in your newly created website, think about the kind of image you want your website to have. Is it a magazine type site? Of is it an informative site? A site selling something obviously has to have pictures of what it is on offer, and a sports site normally needs to have photographs of teams or players. It may be appropriate for a site like this one to restrict the use of pictures to screen shots of example sites.

You may of course also wish to share your photographs, but request, as we do here, that a link back to the originating site is given.