Using Stock Photography

Tasteful use of professional looking images can really bring a website design to life and help to emphasise your key selling points. Of course, that's not to say there aren't some advantages to being in a position to take all of your own photographs or design your own images, it could be a good way to show customers your work environment and get to know your company better. However, when it comes to high quality professional photos to show off your company’s product domain, or to give a little bit of flare to a text heavy area of a site, not everyone running a business owns and knows how to use an SLR camera with expensive lenses combined with a good working knowledge of Photoshop or Illustrator.

This is likely a worse problem if you're a freelancer or a sole trader who uses their private residence as a business base. The option of taking your own photos is probably ruled out and acquiring relevant images can be difficult. With collections comprising of millions of images, stock photography sites make it easy to search for and acquire images you would otherwise have never have been able to get hold of, not to mention that purchasing images from a stock photography website gives you licence to legally use those images in a commercial situation.

Lets assume a hypothetical scenario, you need a picture of a globe for your website to emphasise the idea that you're a global company, you don't want to take your own photo as the quality might not be perfect, or the style of the image won't be what you're after. You can't take images straight from google image search or other websites, as you could face hefty fines if discovered, not to mention the obvious moral implications of this approach. This is where stock photography websites such as Fotolia (fotolia.com) come in. You search for an image, find one that suits your needs and then licence it for use on your website for a less than a pound, then you've got your licensed image that's perfect for your website and with no chance of a fine.

There are a few different websites that provide stock photography on a large scale, for example Dreamstime (dreamstime.com) or iStockPhoto (istockphoto.com), however the problem we've run into here at 2Dmedia is, being in the UK, too many of the photos available on some of the stock photo websites are too American focused, cars and landscapes being an obvious problem; photos of left hand drive cars or Californian roads aren’t much use to a UK based site. Fotolia.com has plenty of variety on this front, with British images much easier to find, including right hand drive cars!

Using a stock photography service is really nice and straight forward too. Using Fotolia as an example, you sign up and can either purchase credits as a one off transaction to pay as you go, which I'm sure for most of our customers will be perfect, but they also offer a subscription based model for customers that may need a more regular refresh of their images. Once you've got credit on your account, you can search and download images as and when you need them.

An innovative approach to recruitment

Thanks to a growing client base, existing client's businesses growing fast and many even bigger, exciting projects, 2D needs to expand!

We need to extend our team of skilled web developers and SEO specialists. But we wanted to do things a little differently and reflect our working environment as well as generate some exposure for our brand... so we created the Blobomatic avatar creator.

There is a story behind all this...

Merry Christmas and a very prosperous new year!

All our team would like to wish our clients a very merry Christmas and prosperous new year!

Our office will be closed from today until 9am on Tuesday 3rd January 2012.

All our servers will be continuously monitored 24/7 and we have staff on-call should there be any issues. If you need to contact us during the closure, please either leave a message by calling our normal number (messages are automatically emailed to on-call staff) or visit our support page to raise a ticket.

We've had an exceptionally busy year and are eternally grateful to our clients for their continued support. Thank you!

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Why we use our own custom web platforms...

One growing market for us is online retail business owners switching from sites built upon open source software.

In this article we discuss some of the issues facing clients who had online shops based upon such software and the problems they have faced before deciding to move to us.

The brand new 2Dcommerce Facebook Catalogue App

We're pleased to launch a Facebook Catalogue for Diva Dogs, stars of Sky 1's "A Different Breed"!

To find out more and have a Facebook catalogue of your own, please contact our team.

We're Hiring! Read on to find out more...

Web Marketing

We are looking for a highly motivated and organised individual to expand our current web marketing team.

The right candidate will be be able to bring marketing strategies to life from the initial planning through to completion; creating reports and plans of action to further enhance website performance. A good understanding of search engine optimisation and what makes a website rank well is a must.