Resources

When you are developing E-learning you need a lot of different things in order to end up with a good product.

First of all you need some good high quality images/photos. In many cases the company ordering the E-learning course have some images they want you to use or maybe they even have an imagebank that you can access. However, most of the times you still need some generic images.

Secondly you probably need some flash components of some sort. If you have the skills you can develop the flash you need yourself, but most of the times it’s quicker and cheaper to buy a ready-made component and adapt it to your needs. I do it all the time and it saves me a lot of time.

Here on this page I have listed some of the resource sites that I use in my work. Take a look and see if they have something you can use in your projects:

Images/Photo resourcesites:

http://www.istockphoto.com – Istockphoto have around 4 million royalty free files for sale. They have photos, vectorgraphics, videos and flash components. The prices are fair and you can buy the images in different sizes to fit your needs. You purchase credits on their site by using a credit card and everytime you purchase an image it will be deducted from your balance. They have some great photos and some really nice vector designs and icons here. The flash components you can buy here are very cheap, but the quality of the components are not the best to be honest. This is a great site when you need to buy photos and vector images but if you need flash check out some of the other options first.

Stock Flash resourcesites:

As for Stock Flash Components there are a lot of different sites out on the web. The quality of the components vary quite a lot and also the amount of components available.

http://activeden.net?ref=heppa – This is the site I use most often. They have almost 6000 flash files so there is a lot to chose between. The files range from preloaders to full websites. Flashden have some pretty strict rules for the quality of the files that are uploaded so normally you get pretty well commented actionscript and some decent help files. In most cases the authors are also pretty good to help with basic support and most accept freelance customization jobs. They also have an active forum where you can ask for help and ideas.

http://www.istockphoto.com – Istockphoto also have flash components, but in my opinion the quality is lower than e.g. flashden and you get no support. However the prices are also lower so if you can modify the components yourself then you can make some good deals.