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What I use to build my web pages:  Sony MVC-FD73 Mavica Digital Camera 

 Click here to see photos I've done with this camera

Canon CanoScan N1220U USB Flatbed Scanner

 Click here for a scan made using the scanner shown above

 

Some goodies I wish I owned:

Sony Mavica MVCCD1000 Digital Camera

 

Canon PowerShot S300 Digital ELPH Camera Kit

How to Grow A Chair : The Art of Tree Trunk Topiary

Sex Tips for Girls

Gardens of Obsession : Eccentric and Extravagant Visions

Good Night Mr. Holmes

Mistress

Crocodile on the Sandbank

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz/the Marvelous Land of Oz/Ozma of Oz : Boxed Set

Harry Potter Boxed Set (Books 1-4)

Churning out Graphics for Web Pages like they Were Sausages

GETTING FREE BACKGROUND AND GENERAL USE GRAPHICS:

Get free graphics off the web from several of the hundreds of sites where people offer their web art for free to not-for-profit web sites. You just surf to the sites, pick up the graphics you like, bookmark the site, and use the bookmark to make a link to credit the designer. These sites mostly offer page backgrounds, horizontal bars, buttons, and little icons and animations you can use to jazz up your site.  Don't over do it, just find a topic appropriate and/or pleasing  set of stuff to use to give your site a little zip.  

CHEAP, NOT FREE, GRAPHICS

Buy clip art and stock photos in those cheap CD-ROM's that kick around the corner of your computer store, then use a graphics program like Adobe Photoshop, or one of it's cheap competitors to reduce the file size and type of file to small GIF's or JPEG's. You can also get web backgrounds and buttons this way now, mainly in cheap boxed collections.  

If you need something fancier, you can get a disk collection of higher quality web art from Photodisk, which made the fun little image seen below. 

If you want a whole graphic suite that looks incredible, for a low price, see Jaguar Woman Web Design for  affordable high-end interface designs that reference art history, world cultures and famous designers like William Morris, Alphonse Mucha, Georges Lepepe and August Racinet. If you want your site to look low key and tasteful, or like a Victorian bordello, a high tech streamlined spaceship console, a Medieval manuscript or an Egyptian tomb, Jaguar has your graphics, ready made and probably for between $2-50 depending on if you are an individual or a business.  She also does custom work.

PUTTING YOUR OWN PHOTOS ON THE WEB

You can put your own photos on the web, without a scanner, by sending your photos to Seattle Film Works . Prices are cheap, and the scans can be delivered to you via the Internet within a week.  Most local photo processors now also offer the service of scanning your photos to disk or CD Rom for an additional fee as well.

If you have a scanner, you can scan them in yourself. Now you have a use for all your old photos, and art work. If you don't have photos or art work of your own you can legally scan in old engravings, photos, and magazine illustrations that have had their copyright expire. Do not copy somebody else's copyrighted works. Then use Photoshop, or another photo program to reduce and alter the scan to web specifications.

HOW TO TURN GRAPHICS INTO WEB GRAPHICS:

Web graphics differ from normal graphics files in one main way: They are smaller file sizes. They need to be a small size because big file sizes take too long to download to be practical. On a slow day on the Internet it can take more than a second per 1k of file to download a graphic, making a 100k file tedious. Normal speed most days can get up to 10k a second, but in the impatient world of surfing, that's a long time too. So web graphics need to be crunched down to fit small sizes.

The two main types of web graphics files are GIF and JPEG. Both use compression to crush them into smaller spaces than normal files. GIF'S are good for line art, transparent images and simple animations, JPEG's are good for photos and photo-like artwork.

Web graphics all use 72dpi resolution, so it is pointless to choose anything but the low quality settings on your choice of output. Using 72dpi and low quality setting on your JPEG files will let you compress a 300k file into an easy to download 30k file or less, while still making a graphic that is at normal web resolution.

To convert a photo to a web graphic you should scan it at 72dpi and 100% (assuming you want it the same size-if you want it larger make the scan ratio a larger percentage while maintaining 72dpi). Then adjust the contrast and picture in your photo program to taste. For B&W photos, remember to tell the program to throw away color information, as this will save you heaps of k. Finish by saving the file as a JPEG, on a low quality setting.

Be aware that when you work in your photo or graphics program making your files, the file size you see displayed in the corner as you are working is not the file size you will get after GIF or JPEG image compression. GIF's may be less than a third of that, JPEG at a low quality setting can reduce size by 10 times or more. You won't see the right file size until you save it and look in your hard drive's file manager.

To optimize a GIF file down to it's lowest possible file size (whether it's an animation or a still GIF), you can go online to the broken link and follow the instructions to reduce the size of your files. The Wizard can cut your files as much as 90% (40-60% is usual) thus making your pages MUCH faster to download for your viewers.   Gif Wizard is not suitable for animated Gifs.

Make a thumbnail (small picture that links to the big one) if the main photo is large, by reducing the photo down to 1.5" and then saving under a slightly different name, like 001t.jpg for 001.jpg's thumbnail.  Front page has a splendid feature in the "tools" menu called "auto thumbnail" that will make these for you automatically while you are putting together your pages.

To convert line-art to a web graphic you also scan at 72dpi, but save as a GIF. If your line art is B&W save it as a bitmapped GIF, for minimum file size. If the color range of the art is limited, you can also save file size by saving at 3-bit, 4-bit, or 5-bit instead of the full range of color.

For further wisdom on web graphics go to:

• Lynda's Homegrrl Page (The leading guru of web graphics)

• Optimizing Web Graphics - webreference.com

• webreference.com - The Webmaster's Reference Library

• The GIF Animation Site

Some sites with good and/or free graphics:

• Jaguarwoman Web Design

• Fontcraft's Scriptorium Fonts and Graphic Arts

• Doodle Bug's Graphics

• Free Craft Theme Backgrounds and Graphics for Web Page, Wallpaper + Email Stationery

• Country Graphics and Clip Art by Original Country Clip Art by Lisa

• Sewn by Joan(TM) - Sewing & Quilting Graphic Links

• Free Antique Graphics for Your Genealogy & History Home Pages