Photos can be a great design element for web pages. A great photo can make an otherwise bland page beautiful. They're particularly useful if you don't have or can't create good art for your pages.

There are plenty of stock photography sites on the web where you can purchase royalty-free images for your site. Unfortunately many of them charge an arm and a leg for each image. What's a designer on a budget to do?

Fortunately there are some good low-cost options. Perhaps one of the oldest is Clipart.com. They have a huge collection of royalty-free art and photos available. Rather than charging per image, they use a subscription model; you subscribe and can then download as many images as you like.

Another source is istockphoto.com. They have a huge collection of excellent photographs, most of which are available for web use for as little as $1 each.

I've used photos to great effect in several sites I've designed:

	Data-net.com The Data-Net homepage is essentially just an ordered list of links, but photos make the list pop. We used several photos from their existing product catalog to highlight the scanners and printers sections. The software and services photos came from Clipart.com.
	MyRecipeBook.com The front page of this recipe-storage site is very minimal - a few links, and a little text. Photos from istockphoto.com jazz up the left side of the page, adding color and visual interest.
	Lifethoughts This is my dad's personal web page. It's got a little text, and a randomized quote at the top, but the randomized NASA images on the left really make it shine. (Reload the page for a different image.) Most NASA and Hubble images may be freely used on the web (but check the specifics of the site you're downloading from to be sure of their policies.)

So, if you're looking to punch up your page design, try photos!