Be Smart on How You Put Your Publicity Photo on Your Site (Part I)

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Do you have a business website that needs your accomodating smiling face to welcome visitors? Do you have a good publicity picture yet? In the internet, I've spotted everything from polished, professional publicity shots, to portraits by photography studios, to the worst shots done in direct sunlight in the back yard.

If you don't have a professional photo, but you think your shot might be good enough to do for now, maybe you're right. After all, most new entrepreneurs are using their credit cards to fund their start up and still operating on a shoestring.

And, even if you are your own webmaster, there's nothing to keep you from getting your publicity photo onto your site. Whether you have something from a studio, or something home grown, this article will tell you what you need to know to show your face to the public.

Let's start with the professional publicity shot. Since you're reading this, I'll assume that you haven't enlisted the skills of a graphic artist. To prepare a good photo for your site, you only have to concern yourself with size and compression. By size, I really mean “dimensions,” that is, how many pixels wide by how many pixels tall. Another kind of size, file size, matters, because a file that is too big will load too slowly in your visitors' browsers. How do you cut down on file size? By reducing the dimensions, and by compressing the image.
First, the dimensions. Normally, your publicity shot is far too large to go onto your website. But don't resize it just yet. First, decide whether to crop it. Cropping means trimming away the outer edges to bring out more of what is important in the picture. In this case, you! If your photographer has already created the perfect framing of your charming face, then you can pass on cropping. However, portraits on the web often need some additional cropping, compared to a publicity shot you might give to a publicist or a portrait that you would put in a frame on a desk. Let me explain.

Most people don't want their picture to dominate their site, unless perhaps they are some kind of superstar, or their face strongly represents their brand. But maybe not. Martha Stewart Living has a picture of Martha that is only about 150 pixels tall. Same for Oprah (except that, last time I looked, her face appeared in five places on her main page). Same for the Pope on the Vatican Radio site, but there are eight of him, three more than Oprah.

Why is this a good size? It doesn't dominate, but it doesn't seem tiny, either. So let's get back to cropping. You want to crop for the web by bringing out your face a bit more than other types of pictures, because you want to fit the picture into a smaller space, smaller even than a typical desk frame. Martha Stewart made her picture feel less constrained by using a white background that blends in with her site's background. Oprah brought out her eyes, and created a bigger presence, despite the small area, by having the top of her head cut off, like they often do for close ups in the movies.

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