If you are a web designer or web developer , you must always be on the lookout for photoshop brushes , vector elements, high resolution textures, vector icons, stock photos and web graphics for your web design or graphic design projects. Who would not be ? For all most all new web design projects involve different topics or category of clients. A proper stock photograph makes the design look complete . The same way , nowadays using icons on web pages and applications is quite the obvious choice .
As I was searching for free stock photographs and free vector icons, I came across this new website which was offering an amazing collection of web designer stuff for an extremely low price . Over 60,000 items priced at just $39 USD , which made me stunned. Not only I bought it for myself , I suggested to almost 5-6 friends of mine who were almost overjoyed. I am still unable to download all the stock photograph and icons from their website as there are so many , but I thought it would be a good idea to blog about it , so that more designers or bloggers like me are able to take advantage of this amazing deal.

Social Bookmarking is nothing new and this post is going to be just another one amongst hundreds . For the past 2 days I myself have been spending some time tinkering with the idea of adding social bookmarking links and icons to these blog. Now adding / installing social bookmarking links is only the easy part . getting people / visitors to use it would be the difficult part , of course. They have got to find the post useful and worth bookmarking , for that.

How to do that ? Go here and download this nifty plugin by the great Alex King There are other similar plugins which adds the icons in the post , which i feel looks a little messy , where as this plugin only shows a small icon , clicking which brings up a popup where the links to other bookmarking sites comes out. However , the plugin comes default with only few sites . But it can easily be increased by little change in configuration , and doing so , will allow you to add links of unlimited other simmilar bookmarking sites as listed in this nice blog.

On another note, in the past 2 days I have also been somewhat active again on DP , where there are about hundreds of webmasters who are buying, renting , exchanging stumbles, diggs, from each other . I wonder how that is going to work … will that result into ban for the sites ? for the exchangers ? or will it actually help increasing such exchanged websites popularity ?

( Look for this option just below this and every post )

Finally took the deciscion after some hunting around .  We have now purchased a subscription at Photos.com , which seems to be a good buy considering the amount of 139 USD . But time and browsing through its library will tell how good their stock of stock photographs really are.

First thing i did after taking the subscription is made it mandatory for all our designers to spend some amount of time each day to search in thephotos library and download as many images from there as time permits . The subscription mentions in its by-laws that photos should not be downloaded unless required , which i believe is bullshit. seriously , i paid for the service when there are several free sites which provide as good images, so why not use it . And anyway , we down here do not get as good broadband connectivity as  in many countries and i doubt our downloads would make any dent on their bandwith bills

Now on to jazzing up our sites ( secretly i wish there was such a site to download fonts per subscription , like this as well )

This is gonna be a quick blog . In the past 2-3 days , some good luck has brought in quite a few template design orders in a row. So the paypal pocket is a bit hefty now , which allows me to indulge . Now , when the paypal pocket is low , you find out so many things you wish you could take /subscribe to … and now when it is better , you always fall into indecisions .

The last time I had taken a stock photo site subscription, I believe it was from Indexstock , but IMO it was not a good collection of images , at least then . Lately I have often heard some of my colleagues / peers mention they use Photos.com or Corbis . So I am little unsure , which one will be the better value for money , hence I have laready posted in one of my favourite forums Sitepoint , and probably would also post in DP .

Stock images, as I have noticed, are sold in ifferent ways on different websites . Whereas in some sites , like GettyImages they allow simple download of all images without a obstrcutive watermarks , in sites like SXC.HU they put the watermark bang on the middle ; Getty has various secure measures in place INSIDE the image which allows them to track the usage of the image on the web, and as the current reports on the webgo , they actively pursue this and send invoices to those who violate their per image license . SXC on the other hand , grant the downloader full rights to use the image on any website in digital format , for single usage . They DO NOT charge for such usage , however they mention that such image should not be used in any print , should not be shared and resold , of course and also NOT used in any template sell , i.e mass circulation of the image for commercial gain.