On user experience: Adding charts, tables & pictures on site

[michellerana]

Hello everyone!
I have a few questions regarding my articles.
I've been thinking about user experience more and more lately and I've incorporated a web 2.0 sharing plugin on my blog and I'm wondering if it's a good idea to provide charts, tables, pictures and links to other sites in my articles. I'm mentioning some software tools, important tables etc. that my readers can find on the internet. Would it be better for me to actually host these pictures and tools (if I manage to find them) on my own website or would this distract the reader too much from clicking on my affiliate links?

Thank you very much!

[faradina]

It would be a very good idea to provide charts, tables, pictures because of their visual appeal. People like pictures, and charts and tables can present information in ways that text paragraphs can not. So go ahead and include (embed) them on your pages.
As for links to other websites, that would depend on what you are linking to and how you configure them to open. If you can get away with not linking to other sites (i.e., put the info on your pages instead of just linking to the content on the other site), then all the better because what we want is for visitors to be clicking through to the vendors' sites when they navigate away from our websites.If you absolutely have to link to other websites to improve the user experience, be very selective as to what you are linking to and make the external page open in a new window so that visitors do not necessarily navigate away from your site.

[snikadin]

Thank you for your quick reply!

What is the best way to go about obtaining illustrations and charts I can use on my website without risking any lawsuits. Should I use pictures from wikipedia or are there any reliable ways to find out if a picture I'm interested is free to use on my website?

Thanks again
/snikadin

[clarafaie]

If illustrations, images, and other content that you want to use are under a GPL, it means that you can use them without violating copyright. There are those that require attribution and those which do not. You can always get in touch with the content owner for the terms of use.

[snikadin]

is there any easy way to find out if the pictures are under GPL? besides contacting the owner ofc.

[wollowra]

Hi Snik,
This was answered in another thread.
website-content/question-about-using-wikipedia-content-t6710.html

Hope that helps.
Regards
Troy

[snikadin]

hi Troy!
Thank you for your reply.
The images I'm mainly interested in using aren't from wikipedia. I was wondering more if there was any easy way to find out if images on websites (not wikipedia) were free to use. Like some kind of database somewhere. It probably doesn't exist but I just wanted to make sure.

Thank you!

[wollowra]

Oh Ok,
Basically if you find a site on google they will have a terms of use policy for using there images.
For example, search for free stock photo's and you will see what I mean.
Other than that, istockphoto.com is good and it only costs $2 per picture.

Regards
Troy

[snikadin]

I'll try it out, thanks again Troy.