An educational resource that began its life as "AbiClipart" in 2003. The collection is a safe way for children to search for images for use in school projects. Of course, other folks also find plenty of uses for the clip art and photos.
WPClipart is a collection of high-quality public domain images specifically tailored for use in word processors and optimized for printing on home/small office inkjet printers. There are thousands of color graphic clips as well as illustrations, photographs and black and white line art. Nearly all are available in lossless, PNG format. The wpclipart server is also able to convert any image (up to 600 pixels in width or height) to a JPG, if that image format is desired.
The project started as a "safe" collection of clipart for my kids. Their middle school used AbiWord, and they were often searching for clipart that was both safe and copyright-free. Since this proved to be both difficult and hazardous (since image searches often yielded some very untoward photos) I decided to create a simple collection for their use. My background as both a photographer and a programmer lent itself well to the project, I put it online with my software for others to download and as the months passed it became very popular.
I made thumbnail pages and put up some Google ads, (made a bit of change every day), then suddenly the Google image search engine spidered the site and my server was a bit overwhelmed. After fielding 20-30k hits a day for a year or so I ended up putting the collection on a dedicated remote server, and the ad revenue takes care of the expense. And by using good image tagging and submitting XML sitemaps to Google with each update, the custom search function really helps track images down.
I did not expect to MAKE any money with the collection, so you won’t see tons of ads and deceptive links or anything "tricky" to try to get clicks. The collection is self-suporting, and making it safe, useful and quick-loading are the ultimate goals. There is a Google ad atop each page clearly marked as such, so kids and everyone else can come by and find what they are looking for without being forced or tricked into viewing product information they are not interested in.
I would LIKE to do this full-time, but I am not sure I could "pay the bills" with the amount of revenue that comes from ads on an image site — not without turning it into a ad-fest, and that would defeat the purpose of having the site in the first place . . . The shear volume of traffic, however, may someday make this possible
