Some Reasons to Not Use the Web...

Given the above caveats, however, there is an enormous number of free graphics sites on the web - probably more than any other kinds of freebie sites (for scripts, Java, services, etc). This is Good News, but the Bad News is that it may take you an enormous amount of time looking through them, especially if you have very specific requirements, and are choosy about the quality of the graphics. The sites I've listed in this article should get you off to a good start, but if you want to minimise the amount of time spent surfing, I suggest that you'd do well to invest a few bucks ($50 - $100 or so) in a clip art collection on CDs, available from your local Staples or Office Depot.

My personal favorite is Art Explosion with some 600,000 images, including vector images, raster images, fine art, classic and traditional images, photographs, backgrounds, web graphics and animations, etc. Unfortunately, many of these CD collections, while having some good images, tend to suffer one major flaw - their classification system, which is usually weak to almost non-existent. So you may still have to spend some time browsing, but probably less than you would online.

Put the Graphics on Your Own Server

Don't link directly to images on another server unless specifically asked to do so. Copy the image to your own server (if the owner has given permission) and embed it in your page with the IMG tag. This point is important enough to warrant some explanation. Linda Cole puts it thus: "when someone views your web site, data is transferred from your server to their browser and stored on their hard drive in a cache directory. The transfer of this data is measured in bytes and all of the bytes added together make up your bandwidth usage. Some Internet Service Providers (ISP's) will charge you if your account uses over a certain limit of bytes or bandwidth per month. When someone links directly to one or more of your graphics they are using your bandwidth. If you are no where near your set limit you will probably never notice this extra usage. On the other hand, some web sites have been forced to shut down for a lack of funds to support their bandwidth. Still others have placed a voluntary block on their accounts when the bandwidth limit has been reached. I'm not saying that all excessive bandwidth is caused by graphic pirates, that's definitely not the case, but it has been known to happen. It's unfortunate, but some of the best free graphic sites on the web have had to close their doors for this reason."

How To Use The IMG Tag

Here's a comprehensive example of an image tag. It's linked to a URL; it has plenty of hspace to keep the text away.
<a href = "/Authoring/HTML/Objects/Images.html"> <Img src = "/Icons/graphics.gif" width = "108" height = "44" border = "0" hspace = "16" vspace = "8" alt = "Click here for more info!" align = "left" ></a>

The names preceding the '=' signs are called attribute names. Only the src attribute is needed for the image to be displayed, but the W3C standards mandate the use of the ALT attribute (not ALT tag) for accessibility reasons, and anyway it's useful for search engine spiders indexing your site. The hspace and vspace attributes are advisable to ensure there's enough white space between the image and any text flowing around it - enabled by use of the align (left or right) attribute. The height and width attributes allow browsers to layout the page while the image is still downloading, and avoids that the text 'shuffles about' as the images come in. Finally, setting border to "0" prevents the hyperlink border from appearing around the image (purists might prefer not to do that).

How To Build a Web Site with Free Stuff 2: Graphics
How To Build a Web Site with Free Stuff Table of Contents
Clip Art and Arrows, Buttons, Animated GIFs, etc...