Stock photography is commonly seen on corporate and personal sites to enhance the content, grab the readers attention or to convey a thought or idea. You already know how effective this can be through your own surfing experiences.

I understand that the message is the most important aspect of a website but I don’t see any reason why images cannot be used to make things a little more colorful, even for a congregation website. Not only do you have a more visually interesting site, something that will increase the amount of time the visitor will remain on your site, but you also show that you are willing to spend time and effort in presenting the message with a little extra effort.

Excuses for not adding images:

“I only have MP3 files on my site, there is no content to associate the image with.”
Well you may want to think about adding the sermon introduction to the same post, or even include your outline so that those listening can follow along. Easy right? Problem solved. Next!

“I don’t have any images and I don’t know where to get images from.”
Please do not put 1995 clip-art on your website. It just looks tacky and cheap. Not the impression we want to give to our visitors.

Not everyone has hard drives full of stock images. Not everyone has the budget to be members of the bigger stock photography websites either. There are other options though, so let’s take a look at them.

Fotolia

You’re looking at around .75c for every image you would purchase. For example, let’s add an image for every sermons we intend posting to the site. On average that would be 52-104 sermons a yr. That would cost you about $40-$80/yr.

Dreamstime

While Dreamstime has stock photography for sale, they also have a completely free selection.

Flickr

Complete guide to finding and using incredible Flickr images

Faith Clipart

This is something a little different that may also save you time in other aspects. They claim to have 34,000 Worship Templates to help you communicate with relevance – Only $129/year!

And if none of these work, perhaps you can start taking a camera around with you and take your own photos

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This is the my first post on Church Website Pro. Free time is in short supply, so they will be short, to the point and with no pre-defined schedule.

I am going to try and focus on items that would be beneficial to congregations who see value in having a website and hopefully convert a few who don’t.

Posts may include:

• 3rd party websites that offer a service we could all use
• features or extensions that would increase usability and interaction with visitors
• things you haven’t thought about but should
• anything I find that rocks and want to share

Feel free to bookmark the site or subscribe to the rss feed and that way you will always know when updates have been made.

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