Saturday, March 24, 2007

Copyrights and Free Resources For Building A Web Site

In order to build a successful web site you need to get a lot of relevant texts and a lot of relevant photos. You need huge amounts of texts to rank high on Search Engine Results Pages but without photos texts tend to get boring. A successful web site aims at prolonging visitor’s stay, using seducing tactics like the colors the flowers use to prolong the staying of the bees…
One can write his own texts and publish his own photos, but it will take him much longer than being helped also by others’ texts and photos. Others’ texts and photos are copyrighted. So the question is where on the WWW are free resources for building successful web sites?
1. Fair Use: text is free up to about 300 words as long as you reference the quoted source.
2. Wikipedia is an excellent resource without any limits on the length of the quote.
3. Books and newspapers, which don’t have valid copyrights anymore. E.g. Gutenberg project’s thousands of on line books.
4. Creative-Commons photos. E.g. Flickr, Jewish Encyclopedia.
5. Getting permission to publish texts and photos from copyrights holders.

Readers are encouraged to add free resources on the comments section of this web page.