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Photos
Skip over this section on photos and scroll down to the next session if you already are familiar with images for the web.
You can use a digital camera to take still photos ready for use on the web, or you can use a regular camera and have the photos digitized by your local photo developer. Photos are usually stored as individual .jpg files (example: yourpicture.jpg).

Your Camera: When you take a photo with your digital camera, you can usually change it's settings to take pictures that are web ready (usually a smaller file size than is needed for printing).
So for an example if you take the highest quality setting on a 2.1 megapixel, chances are you will have a picture that displays larger than you will need for a computer monitor. With the higher setting, the quality will be better for printing (if you are also physically printing photos), but will display as a larger picture dimension (size) on the web page. This is because computer monitors use digital picture files differently than printers do.
If you want to cut out portions of your photographs, change their size, add special effects or touchups and corrections to them, you will need an image editing program where you can do things like use image size tools, add special effects, or use the crop tool (see ulead below) to select an area of the picture that you need and cut it out.

Buy Photos You can buy Photos (see individual photo sites for any use restricitons) that you can use as is or edit them. Try iStockphoto or Dreamstime.

Tip: It should be noted here that you usually don't want too much loaded on one single page. You will want to display your photos on several pages connected together by links, or make them smaller, so people with slower internet connections can access your page without waiting forever for it to display. See our download time calculator later in this tutorial.

Photo Size Optimization: Jpeg compression tools, like those included in and PhotoImpact® below, compress or shrink down the file size of photos for faster visitor downloading and less wasted bandwidth. Jpeg compression tools will change the picture files, so you don't want to use them on files you intend to print. You can always make copies of the originals, and then edit the copies. You also need to experiment with the compression so you get the right balance between size and quality. In other words compress until your needed level of quality suffers. Gif compression is for .gif files. Use of compression tools is not mandatory but is suggested.

Photo Editing: To get fancy graphics and text (like to make a company logo) you need a slightly artistic hand and a image editing/paint program such as Ulead® PhotoImpact® or
Corel Paint Shop Pro.
There are also free image editing programs here. You should be able to download and install full working demos to try any of these programs.

For advanced drawing you may be interested in Adobe® Illustrator®.

Logos, text and cartoony pictures are usually stored as .gif files. There are also various
logo creation software you can buy at your local computer store or on the web. In PhotoImpact® you can also make the small animated gif pictures that you see on the web.

See how a web page works!
This will help you understand how to make a website. An .html file (webpage) is a plain text document computer file, like word pad or notepad that is saved as an .html extension (file type) ex: index.html or yourpagename.html The HTML file is stored on your web server provided space, along with all your picture files, sound files, etc.

The html file contains html(text codes for webpages) that tell what text, and pictures, etc. to display where and when and how on a webpage. Each .html file displays one page. Note: the index.html page is stored in your main web host directory and is always the first page accessed by visitors when they type yourwebsitename.com . You can name other pages anything you want.

People surfing the web (viewing web pages) then use a web browser (IE or Netscape or others) to interpret(read) the html file and display your webpage.