I don't know you but if you are really willing to relocate, try the Gulf Coast area. The rebuilding from Katrina and Rita had not been completed in the central/west-central Gulf Coast when we had Gustav and Ike this year. Florida has been hit several times in the last few years; I would guess they are in the same situation. Skilled craftsmen are almost impossible to find here. The pay rates have risen along with the shortage. I have been waiting since 2005 to have a door replaced!

I point all my clients to droa.com and suggest buying a long-term registartion (e.g. 5 years). Also pick up some alternate spellings to "park" on your main domain to catch that traffic and to prevent competitors from trying that dirty trick. There are some not widely known technical reasons for keeping the part between the "www." and the ".com" to 12 characters or less. And something shorter is easier for visitors to remember *and* to fit on a business card, yet mroe reasons to pick up alternate names for the longer versions of your company name while using a smaller one for the main hosting account. Not so much for the original poster but anyone running thier own site, there are some tricks to substantially reducing bandwidth of downloaded photos. Always use a low-quality preview photo that is no larger than it appears onthe page and link to a higher quality shot where that's needed if someone wants a closer look. If you can track where most of your traffic is going, those are the paths to check first on tuning picture resolutions. Limiting use of graphic navigation system is also a plus, especailly if you want someone on dialup to be able to navigate your site. Though I'm a big proponent of using the web as a cheap way to share photos with clients, I also push not forcing them to download lots of graphics unless they really want to see it. A simple but fast and clear site will get a lot more return visits than one that is flashy but too cluttered and impossibly slow to load over dialup.

I don't know anything about AOL, Connie. So I'm not sure what they have to offer. I'm not sure why Paul doesn't like Godaddy.com. He probably has a valid reason and I definitely trust his judgement. But I can say from my experience that I have used them for registering domain names for over 3 years and have not had one single problem with them. I have registered 3 names with them and they have only cost me $8.95 a year each. The first 2 things that you need to do is: 1. Decide where you are going to get web space. Does your account with AOL give you free web space? If so, I would use it. If you plan to use the website for a commercial site then make sure you can use the free space for that purpose. My isp gives me 100 mb's of web space and they don't care if it's used for personal or commercial use, but some isp's want you to pay extra for commercial use. To give you an idea about how much space that is.....I have 97 web pages online, which total to less than 20 mb's. And most of those pages are filled with photos. So 100 mb's is a lot of space!!! 2. Decide which company you will use to register your domain name. There are quite a few companies out there and you can do a search for them. I used GoDaddy.com because someone at either this forum or the computer help forum recommended them several years ago, and I have been very happy with them. Maybe someone else can recommend a site for registration that they have used. Once you have taken care of those 2 things, then the rest is a piece of cake. Make your webpage(s) and upload them.

The reason why the picture looks better in the viewer is because you putting 7.1 million pixels in that 2" square. SO you have effect of clear, sharp picture. When you upload pictures to host sites like photobucket quality is down graded, however I have never known photobucket to rally comprimise the quality of the photo. When you are cropping the picture no longer has 7.1mp, you are cuttign away at the picture, taking away pixels. You might hear the term "100% crop" what this means is that the picture is true to the exact image size, ie: here is a 8mp picture condensed to a smaller sizeand a 100% crop next to it: When you begin cropping the picture you start to notice the flaws of technique, camera, and lens. I never do edited from the memory, do it on the computer and I always keept he original in tact until I am finished. Joe