newbie help - setup for website

i just got back from weeks at Roatan and Grand Turk with my new UW D100 setup.

It was my first pictures and I am fairly pleased.

My question for all of you guys with websites -

I'm putting together my website right now, mainly to show to friends.

What quality size pictures do you do? I would prefer not to make the pictures too small or poor in quality.

how do you protect your pictures? Do you watermark? What program do you guys use? I just started using Picasa from Google. A free program that does basic functions for color, saturation. It also sets up a "website friendly" page that is very easy to use.

thanks.

I use gallery as the backend for a very simple website. Easy to use, and you can set it up to resize your shots as well as applying a watermark.

As to size, I stick with 640x480 for the most part, and try and set the compresion to make each shot around 200-300k.

If you really want to keep the site small and fast, 100k is probably a good file size.

I use the free program jalbum to set up a website. This program allows for a lot of customization. It can automatically resize, sharpen, watermark, add border. (I don't use these features, though, using Photoshop scripts instead.) It can manage large albums, keeping things consistent. I use the ExhibitPlus skin. I've never tried Picasa so I don't know how they compare. In terms of size, I am currently using high quality 540x360 but this is probably a little too small.

Does anyone have tips for good auto-sharpen procedures? I'd like the resized photos to be well-sharpened, but I haven't found a USM setting which works for every photo. 300 0.2 0 USM, with layer opacity of 30% seems to be a good baseline. But more detailed photos require less opacity; I guess I should try to find a good standard threshold amount.