If you have photos that you want to add to your site, be sure to optimize them first before uploading them. Optimizing is reducing the pixel width and height of the graphic so that it will appear exactly as you want them on your page. With new digital cameras increasing their resolution capability to attract customers, photos taken from these cameras become larger in resolution and file size. Any photo taken from digital cameras need to be resized and optimized for website use.

To reduce the size of the photo, you must use an image editing program and save it as a JPEG or GIF. That smaller sized image that you saved as a GIF or JPEG will now load more quickly on your visitor's computer.

Optimizing your photos not only improves how quickly your pages load (critical for dial-up users) but reduces distortion and helps reduce server disk usage and bandwidth consumption.

It is usually best to resize photos using the software that comes with the purchase of a digital camera, however, if you are using Windows XP, there is a program called PowerToy Image Resizer which you can download for free from Microsoft's web site. This add-in enables you to resize your photos. It can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx.