Designing websites and running blogs mean that from time to time at LeadGenerators we have to find graphics to use and adapt.

We know that the visual effect of a web page is very important, so we will make sure that our clients have pages that make an impact and communicate the right message. Although the stock libraries of images are usually good value, we like to keep costs down for our clients by using interesting quality images that are low cost, and even free, if we can find them.

So it was good news in June when Google and Yahoo added Creative Commons tabs to their search options.

Creative Commons is a forward-thinking concept that allows the use of digital resources that people have made available on the Internet. The Creative Commons licensing is designed to be more user-friendly than conventional author rights, which can be intimidating. Under the CC format, people who upload their media to sites like Flickr can state the limitations of use for their work. This means they can say if it can be used for commercial purposes and whether they are happy to see their work modified, or, as Yahoo puts it, resources to “remix, tweak and build upon.”

The majority of CC images have Attribution licenses, which means the author asks for the small courtesy of having their name credited to the picture and/or a link to the original source.

This is easy to do in a blog, and is befitting the community spirit of social media.

With the new filters added, we can use Google and Yahoo image searches to find photos that people have uploaded. I prefer these to the usual Flickr search function because the thumbnail layout is easily browsable. By defining what I need in the advanced search options I can browse images that are “free to use or share, even commercially.”

So when I wrote on our Everest blog about getting jabs for travelling through a region of the Himalaya where there’s malaria, I was able to break up the text with an image of an angry dog and a close up of a hypodermic needle. It makes a post much more dramatic than text alone.

We have also found that a significant proportion of unique visitors arrived at our blog by clicking on the images of Mount Everest in Google search results. Because people may enter your site through images it means a good choice of images can influence the traffic and readership of your blog.