Nina,
There are lots of ways to use the Web in addition to Web sites. You can
upload photographs of your work (or your kids, or whatever) in a just a
few minutes, and those images are available instantly to everyone on the
Internet. The big advantage to using the Web rather than sending graphic
files attached to an email, for example, is that the person viewing the
images only has to enter the special URL address in order to see them. You
can name the files anything you want and give that name to only who you
want to see them. The idea is you don�t have to create a Web site for your
images to be seen. Let�s say you already have a Web site called
www.jewelry.com, and you have some photos of pieces, or work in progress,
or photos of your workshop that you want to share with people via Orchid.
Then you could upload them to a special directory attached to your Web
site called, let�s say, www.jewelry.com/newdesigns (the address becomes
cap sensitive after the forward slash, by the way). Now that the photos
are there, you can call me or email the address to me so I can get on-line
and see them. If you want people at Orchid to see these, then when you
post your note add the address and make it an active link so that people
can just click on the blue text and the page of photos opens up � just
like that.
Let�s say that you don�t have a Web site, then you can get a directory
account that is like a mini Web site. It comes with certain size and name
limitations, but you can get them quite inexpensively, like for under
$20.00 per month. Now you can either create a home page, or you don�t have
to. What you can do is attach drawings to your address the same way as
above, only watch out that you don�t go over the maximum allowable storage
allotment.
Of course, your images must be in digital form to do this. For photos, you
will need to create them using either a digital camera or by scanning the
image. Some photo processing labs will scan 35mm photographs and give you
back a floppy disk in addition to your prints. Now, you will also need
software to view the images and adjust them before copying them to your
Web site. I use Adobe PhotoShop, but there are many. If you purchase a
scanner, a PhotoShop type program is usually included. Mainly what you
need to do is reduce the resolution and image size so that it won�t take
forever for the images to come into view.
Polaroid images will work fine for most purposes. Take them to Kinko�s or
a copy shop and they can scan them for you if you don�t have a scanner of
your own. I will put up some shots that I took with my Polaroid camera of
some jewelry I made later this week so you can see what they will look
like. I will also include a step-by-step instruction sheet on how to
upload files this way.
Regards,
Doug Sperr