Jane May Blogs

If you are creating a web site that requires images, FreePhotos.com is a great place to look. They provide royalty free images for anyone to use. The site is incredibly easy to navigate and all the images are provided by the users. “User generated content” is the wave of the future and FreePhotos.com was way ahead of this trend since 2004 when they first launched. When the owner approached me to write a review on the site, he said he has not put as much time into the site as he would have liked and hopefully after some of the feedback I provide in this post, he can have the site reach it’s full potential because I think it can be marketed very successfully.

Layout

The layout is very clean and easy to navigate, but the images need a little revamping, especially the header banner. A web 2.0-ish redesign of the banner would work wonders for the site. Besides that, the other areas positioned well.

Domain Name

This is a great domain name for the services offered. It allows the site to rank well for great keywords such as:

• “free photos” - 12th in Google
• “royalty free photos” - 29th in Google
• “free stock photos” - 47th in Google

These are great keywords to rank for. With a few more SEO tactics, the site can move its way up the ranks for pertinant keywords like “free images” and “free pictures”. The fact that the site has been around since 2004 is great for it’s SERP rank.

Functionality

The functionality of the site is great with one minor problem. As a new user, you must sign up to  upload and download photos. All of yesterday I was trying to sign up using the “Sign Up Free for full access!” link in the top right corner which didn’t work. I later found a much simpler ”Sign Up Now” option on the home page on the left sidebar. FreePhotos should fix their full sign up page, but keep the easy “Sign Up Now” option on the home page as I prefered that one.

Once I signed up I received a nice email that mentioned going to the forum, but I couldn’t find a link to the forum anywhere on the site so I would remove the forum part in the email. As I searched through other members I saw that FreePhotos.com has an impressive 9951 existing members with over 2800 photos available. I am not surprised by this because the photos they have are great quality. I know I will be using some of their images for my upcoming projects!

Monetizing FreePhotos.com

With everything going for this web site, the only thing left is to improve the monetization methods used. Currently, FreePhotos uses one skyscraper ad on the right side which (probably) doesn’t make nearly as much money as it can. If a leaderboard fits just below the top navigation, I would insert one there. If not, you can run a 468×60 text only banner ad. If you want to keep the skyscraper banner, I would move it from the right side to the left side as research shows that visitors are more likely to click ads on the left side rather than the right side. To further monetize, they can include banner ads at the very bottom of the page for products (Azoogle) that match your topic.

To dramatically improve your click through rates once you implement ads on top of the page, be sure to set the hyperlink color to match your existing font color on top.

Marketing

I just had a quick marketing idea for FreePhotos.com, which would be to market to the same crowd that uses and is responsible for the Photobucket and Flickr success - the Myspace crowd. This would take some manual labor but could attract a lot more photos if targeted toward the right groups (just a quick thought I had).

When I do reviews, I don’t often recommend a product to my readers unless I would personally use it and this is a site that I know I will use in the near future. If you need free stock images, I highly recommend you check out FreePhotos.com.

If you would like your web site or blog reviewed on this site by me, then contact me here.