Stock photography put simply, is a large collection of searchable photographs and other imagery for us in publications such as magazines, press releases and of course web-design. Stock photography eliminates the need to hire a professional photographer in most cases and can save you a small fortune in return. But getting your hands on cheap or even free stock photography is nearly always impossible.

Until now that is. The other day I came across a gem of a site called stock.xchng that offer no strings attached FREE stock photography. To good to be true you may think, yes, but no, it is true.

About stock.xchng:

Stock.XCHNG was launched in February 2001, as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. In about two years the site evolved into this massive community you see now - there are about 200.000 registered users and more than 100.000 photos online!

All the photographs I looked at were of high quality and very professionally done. Some of the photographs do have usage agreements so check carefully before you download and use them although nearly all the photographs I looked at had no usage restrictions.

The site can get terribly slow at times and you will need to be registered before you can download any photographs. Registration is also FREE.

If scripts and codes intimidate you I have some good news. You don’t have to be a good programmer to build a fully functional website. I was never really good with codes but I have a high level of curiosity. In short, I download code snipplets from other websites and modify them for my own. Hacking these scripts to suite your needs can be challenging, but it’s not half as hard as writing them up line-by-line yourself. For those of you who don’t like to search for things there are tons of online repositories where these scripts are held. Most of these repositories have thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands scripts in store, ranging from code snipplets to full-featured web applications to help you build better functionality for your website.

One favorite place that supplies most of my scripting needs is Hotscripts.com and the reason they’re my favorite is because they offer a good range of variations, from ASP to XML, covering fields as broad as news publishing to rare things like zip code locators.

So next time you’re in need of a good programmer sans the budget, hire Hotscripts.com for FREE!

Most bloggers start out with nothing and build up their image and content over time. With that they expect automatic traffic, instant fame and popularity. Some make it big, but most simply fail and give up. It all comes back to the reason why people blog. Some just do it for the sake of blogging, to kill time, to have fun and to share what they have in mind with the world. But others aim blindlessly for various moving targets. The latter don’t usually last when they don’t get what they want.

The Blog Herald has an excellent article by Duncan Riley about blogging perseverance. He talks about how one can generate and build traffic through perseverance.

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met a person yet who doesn’t like people visiting their blogs, but I’ve know plenty of people who want more people to visit their blogs. Building up a number of blogs over the past few months has reminded me of a lesson that’s is sometimes forgotten in the pursuit of traffic and (for some) wealth on the blogosphere. Perseverance.

Very few people find fame and fortune through launching a blog overnight, but over time most people can build a reasonable audience, or even more, based on perseverance at blogging, literally going the distance.

He also shared a few tips for traffic building:

Post regularly - I can’t emphasize enough that you wont build traffic unless you post regularly. Blogging should never be a chore but try setting a time each day you can spend reading and blogging as required. By all means take days off, but develop a pattern.

Post quality - You need to provide readers with a reason to return, and quality does it all the time. Quality is of course subjective, so some research in your market or amongst your peers might give you an idea of what works, or what isn’t being catered for.

Don’t give in - There are going to be times where you get the blog blues, where you’d ask yourself why you even bothered, we all get them at some stage, your success will be measured on your ability to get past this and get on with the task at hand. Remember, the longer you post and the more you post, results in more traffic from search engines, which means more visitors to your blog.

Happy blogging!

Knowing who your visitors are and where they are coming from is an important factor in web marketing strategy these days. Simply displaying a visitor counter on your front page isn’t enough, you need something considerably more advanced, something that will tell you where your visitors are coming from, what sites referred them to yours and which search engines are indexing you.

Bring on Statcounter.com, a highly configurable and FREE hit counter with customisable real-time detailed reports, invisible tracking, search engine analyse, referral tracking and more. Simply insert a piece of code into the pages on your site that you want statistics for and you will be analysing and monitoring visitors to your site within minutes. The free version has a log size of 100 entries and supports sites with no more than 250,000 page loads per month, which is just perfect for a personal or small business site.

If you’re looking for free, quick and easy logos or buttons for your web site then give CoolText a try. Simply choose whether you want to create a logo or button, then input your text, change the colour options and click render. Instant logos or buttons ready to download and use in your web design.

A few days ago I talked about affordable web templates as a mean to facelift your website in a professional fashion without choking your budget. Today I’m going to talk about a company called PixelBrick, previously owned by two teenage designers which were later bought (hired) by Ceonex and turned into a multi-million dollar company.

For starters they charge somewhere up to $40k for a website, maybe more. This keeps ordinary clients out, leaving their market to the big players, mostly those in the hosting business such as HostRocket, One World Hosting and EZ Web Hosting to name a few. Their portfolio page boasts these big clients.

I gotta give it to their professionality. They help you with every single aspect of your site, including extras like SEO and powerful backend capabilities such as client management and billing systems. They’re probably the greatest in the business, or at least the greatest that I know of.

Their mission overview reads:

We are shaping the digital future by providing unique online functional and presen tati onal development for the global business community through turnkey web strategy, design and technology solutions.

PixelBrick has successfully assembled a dynamic pool of creative and technological resources to achieve what some reviewers call “phenomenal results”. We invite you to take a look at our extensive portfolio.

No tech talk and sales mumbo jumbo - just facts, case studies and rock-solid references in plain English. You be the judge if we are the right company to take your internet presence to the next level.

Phenomenal results. Quite a treat for their high paying customers and in the world of serious business corporate image is mission-critical. If you drop by their portfolio you’ll agree that their work is indeed phenomenal.

So folks, just a brief peek at the high-end design market that exists between our blogs and the corporate world.

Until next time.

So you started a blog, wrote a few good posts and waited for people to come. They never came. So you thought to yourself, maybe I should post more, and more, and more… No one came. Then you started telling your friends to come to your blog; they come once and never return, cuz they’re not bloggers and they don’t get the idea of blogging.

Some people endure blogging without much readership because they simply want/need an outlet. But a lot of others don’t/can’t have much fun with blogging without decent readership. Vanity is a contagious.

Ok so for those of you who want free traffic without doing much effort, BlogExplosion has come to your rescue. This is what they can do for you, in their own words:

You spend all night setting up your very own blog, but in short time you realize nobody is coming to read it. You jealously watch the biggest blogs out there getting tons of attention but how can your blog get noticed too?

That’s where BlogExplosion comes in to send people to your blog. Imagine getting hundreds or even thousands of other bloggers coming to read your blog every month!

The concept is very simple. You read other blog sites and they in return visit your blog. Blogexplosion is the internet’s first blog exchange where thousands of bloggers visit each other’s blogs in order to receive tons of blog traffic. Imagine how many other people out there could be adding your blog to their blogroller and how many people would be reading your blog every day with this sort of attention. It’s free to use!

It’s no lie. We have been using BlogExplosion for a quite some time now and it really helps. Most people surf just to get credits, but there are those who surf to find out about other blogs. When you surf in that fashion you’ll find the experience very rewarding. You can meet new bloggers, make new friends, see different kinds of blog designs, learn about blogging strategies, all while having a great time with yourself. So don’t sit around waiting for people to come to your blog, visit theirs first and they’ll visit yours.

Happy blogging!