ladies! look at the photo above. if you fade and blur the heck out of your pic, it will void any undesirable feature you might have. you'll also look elegant, arty, and it will shave a score of decades off your mug. here i used the 'transparency' tag to further this effect. this is a photo of janet reno. coming soon! how to take decent pictures of yourself! ugly people, too!
photos are always a welcome addition to a personal website. a picture is worth a thousand mega-bytes. here you can show the world YOUR world. your ugly mug, your dysfuntional family, your baby's first bowel movement, your collection of rare cigarette butts, whatever.
if you have many pics, divide them into seperate pages. for example 'Travel Photos', 'On the Job', 'In Jail', etc. limit the number of photos on each page. it's very insuting to expect a patient viewer to wait for 30 blurry pics or your car to download.
5 photos per page is a good rule-of-thumb, but of course it depends on the file size of your photos, the smaller in byte size, the more you can fit on a page. choose only only the best ones. nobody wants to see 156 pictures of your stupid dog, not even your stupid dog.
optimize (reduce the bytes) of your pictures. remember that your onlne guest are waiting for your pics to download. so if your photos are in no particular order, at least put ones with the lowest bytes on top of your page.
for faster loading, concentrate just on your photos. no bars, animations, patterned backgrounds, etc. should never be on a photo page, save the bandwidth for the pics. besides, pure colors, straight lines and perfect angles will make a human face look sickly and distorted.
photos seem to look best with a darker color background. pick soft or muted hues. as with clothes, black is always acceptable. if you like backgrounds, pick a very simple, stark, low byte image. no patterns! even cindy crawford would look like a dork surrounded by cartoon teddy bears.
you can present your photos in four different formats: you can put your photos on your page just the way they are. this is the easiest way, but sucks in general, because your guest has to scroll down a mile to see all the images. for some reaon, the huge diensions look awkward. this is commonly seen on 'PageBuilder' pages. you can make thumbnails (which are tiny versions of you original photos) that viewers can click on to see the large version of your pics. the advantage of this is a much faster loading page, and the viewer can choose which one he/she wants to see enlarged. the disadvantge is that thumbnails can be a pain in the butt to make, especially if you have many photos. another way is to just display smaller versions of your photos, without the option of 'click to enlarge'. this will make for a faster loading page, looks clean, and you can fit more pics per page. it's also ideal for vanity, on a small photo, crow's feet and other imperfections aren't visble for total strangers to dwell on. the most common method is to use the 'height' and 'width' tags to display your photos smaller, and use "a href" tags to make 'em clickable to the orginal size. now your page is smaller, your viewer has a choice of which ones to see enlarged, which will pop right up, since they are already downloaded.