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Something that I have taken notice of as of late is all the great photos that are out on the web. A lot of these images have me wondering how much it costs to take a shot like that. Or better yet how can I afford to have that great image on my site when I clearly don't have the money to do so. Well I guess the good news to that is that I have come across a way to finding some free images online.

Both iStock and Flickr offer a service on their site where customers can download free images. On iStock all that you need to do is log-in or create an account with iStock and you will be good to go. Every week iStock releases their "Free Photo of the Week", along with vectors, video and audio. Look for their “Free Photo of the Week” located at the top-center of the home page. The image from this article is an image I downloaded from iStock free files.

Flickr's services are a little more detailed but they offer a wide number of images that you can select from as long as you follow their instructions. Do the following:

• Log-in or create an account with Flickr.
• Select the "search" button next to the blank search box.
• On the next search page select the "Advanced Search" link next to the blank search box.
• From here scroll down the page 'til the "Creative Commons" section appears and select the box that reads "Creative Commons-licensed content" and again hit the search button located at the bottom of this page.
• This will bring you to a page with a bunch of images and a search box; Select any of the images or type inside of the search box and located toward the bottom of the selected image is a section labeled "Additional Information".
• Select the link "Some rights reserved" and the next page informs users on how and for what purpose the image can be used for.

I encourage people to go and check out both of theses sites and see what each one has to offer. Let me know how theses two sites work for you.

Something easy and simple that I learned recently from a good friend was how to keep simple code clean in Joomla! Prior to learning these simple tricks, I would have been using a WYSIWYG Editor (What You See Is What You Get) in the back-end of Joomla! and this editor is great for using when first being introduced to Joomla! However the WYSIWYG Editor will not keep your code nice and clean, in-fact when you see the html code it will look like the "space" and "return" keys never existed.

Using the editor is straightforward and kind of like vanilla. You know how everyone likes vanilla but it is not very ones top choice; well the same goes for the editor. Now if you saw what plain html looked like you might say it looks... plain, but in fact seeing html code that is done right is actually quite satisfying.

Well how do you get your code looking that way? With practice of course. Start by getting yourself familiar with basic tags. Learning the basics of good code is a great way to being able to see where paragraphs end, an images placement in an article, hyper links to other sites and so forth. Here are just a couple of tags that I first picked-up:

<p>-paragraph</p> <h1>-heading</h1>
<strong>-bold</strong> <em>-italic</em>

Secondly, I would recommend following others around you who have been writing code for quite some time. If you have good people around you who have been doing this for a while make sure to ask them if you’re on the right track every now and then. The same friend that happened to show me a better way of organizing my code has also been great about blogging on proper code.

You might have found that some of the images that have been inserted have the issue of running up the edges of content or words.

To give the image and content the proper amount of spacing we’ll have to inform the editor that there will need to be spacing placed between these two items.

To do this, just follow these steps:

1. Inside a Joomla! article select an image from the files or upload a new image.
2. Once selected you can choose the “edit CSS style” button, and a window with different options will appear.
3. Inside the window click the tab that reads ”Box” and under this tab is a section labeled “Margin”
4. Inside the section labeled “Margin” uncheck the “same for all" box. Now the other options below this box will become available.
5. Inside these now available sections is where you can put in the spacing that you desire to have between images and content (I find that pixels work best).
6. Once you believe that you have found the correct amount of spacing click the “update" button inside the window. Make sure to apply and save all changes.

The image will now have a space where the content used to run up against its edges. If you feel the need to take away or add space, you can by repeating the previous steps. Let me know if it works for you.

Every one knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. But for a webpage an image can turn a bland page into an incredibly illustrated website. This tip will help with uploading and inserting an image into your webpage.

To do this, just follow these steps:

1. Start off in the back end of Joomla! Open the article manager then open the article you wish to edit.
2. Click the “image” button at the bottom left and a window will come up.
3. Click on the “browse file” button and options such as my documents and desktops will appear.
4. Find the image whether in a folder or on the desktop and choose the “select” button. The browse file box will close. Once closed, click on the “start upload” button. This will place the image into the image directory folder.
5. Scroll through the images, which are in alphabetical order and the uploaded image, will be inside the image directory.
6. Once the image has been located, click the insert button at the top right.
7. The picture will be placed inside the backend of Joomla! From here the image can be aligned, turned into a link and so-forth. Make sure to apply and save.
8. Go and refresh the live page to see the uploaded image.

Let me know if it works for you.

You might want to add a link to another page or another website inside one of your content items.

To do this, just follow these steps:

1. Inside the backend of a Joomla! article, highlight the content that you would like to become a link.
2. Click on the link button; a window with different options will come up.
3. The first empty box should read ”Link URL”. This is where you should type in the address you would like the link to take visitors to.
4. For now we will leave the other options on the window alone. Click the insert button at the bottom left corner and this will make the highlighted content from step one a blue font.
5. Click the save button at the top right of Joomla! Once saved the page should relocate to the Article Manager.
6. Now on the live webpage, refresh and scroll the mouse over where the link should appear. A fingernail should appear, which means that the content has been turned into a link.
7. Click on the link and it should open up a window with the address that was typed into Link URL in step 4.

Let me know if it works for you.

“Diligence is the mother of good luck.” - Benjamin Franklin. This famous quote states that there is no good luck, but that luck is the result of diligence and hard work. This is something we took to heart in creating PoeticEstates.com. PoeticEstates.com is a sample website for an imaginary Realtor, Sally Newcastle.

We built this site to showcase what we can deliver in a website for realtors and real estate developers. We want clients to know what services we are able to deliver, specifically for those in the real estate industry, as well as how those services can be beneficial and increase ROI.

A personal realtor web site built by Poetic Systems can feature:

• The ability to display realtor pictures and add personal touches
• An easily managed blog that will keep search engines crawling the site
• Fully customizable colors and layouts
• The essential MLS database search engine
• Fully functioning mortgage calculators as well as other financial calculators and services
• A personalized contact page that can automatically email the site owner
• Fully customizable email addresses
• Special featured home modules
• And many more options

We hope PoeticEstates.com will better enable realtors to envision what their own site could be like. We welcome visitors to check out PoeticEstates.com and enjoy the site's many features. Please remember that this is only the surface and that the sky is the limit as far as what we can create for our clients.

You may have noticed that when you copy content and paste it into the back-end of Joomla!, it also copies the formatting of the content. This can cause inconsistencies with the rest of the content on your site.

To avoid this you must first strip any formatting from the content before pasting it into the back-end of Joomla! To do this, just follow these steps:

1. Open a plain text editor (you can use TextEdit on a Mac or Notepad on a PC).
2. Paste the content into the plain text editor. You should see that all of the formatting has been removed.
3. Copy the content in the plain text editor and paste it into the back-end of Joomla!.
4. Reapply any styles that are needed, such as bold or italics, using the buttons in the editor in the back-end of Joomla!.
5. Save the changes and view the article on your site.