Creating a visually rich design for your website is really dependent upon adding pictures or illustrations. A website without any type of media will feel a bit bland unless amazing work has been done with typography and colors, which is rarely the case.

So yeah, you need pictures. Not everybody has the talent of taking amazing pictures or the budget for hiring a professional photographer. Your best option then is to use what we called stock photos: generic pictures of great quality for a low cost. Lots of sites now offer stock photos, like IstockPhoto and ShutterStock, just to name a couple.

However, you might have a really tiny budget and those sites are now charging more and more for those great quality stock photos.

Fortunately, a couple of sites have sprung up recently offering totally free stock photos, which for the most part can be used in commercial projects without any restrictions.

Here is a list of some of those sites:

• Unsplash: http://unsplash.com/ – great quality and updated weekly, landscapes, travel, devices, people, etc.
• Little Visuals: http://littlevisuals.co/ – decent quality, updated weekly, mostly landscapes and abstracts, some textures.
• Death To The Stock Photo: http://join.deathtothestockphoto.com/ – Update via inbox, good quality, lots of people shots
• PicJumbo: http://picjumbo.com/ – really good quality, lots of devices shots and large aperture shots
• Picography: http://picography.co/ – good quality, mostly landscapes and travel shots
• Gratisography: http://www.gratisography.com/ – very good quality, some weird shots, artistic.
• Jay Mantri: http://jaymantri.com/ – good quality, lots of textures and city landscapes.
• Magdeleine: http://magdeleine.co/browse/ – excellent quality, mostly landscapes.
• MorgueFile: http://www.morguefile.com/archive – usually good quality, very wide range of subjects.
• SplitShire: http://splitshire.com/ – really good quality, some models shots.
• Super Famous Studios: http://superfamous.com/ – excellent quality, lots of landscapes and textures.
• RaumRot: http://www.raumrot.com/ – Excellent quality, lots of subject types.

If you have other resources, please share in the comments and we will add to the list.