You’re putting together a new website and everything is in place except for one thing: your picture. You begin to question whether you actually have to have a picture at all, particularly since you never seem to get around to getting the appointment made at the photography studio. You go back and forth with yourself about whether you need a professional portrait made, or whether a snap with the digital camera would do. Meanwhile, as the battle rages on in your mind, you still don’t have a picture on your site.

As the web becomes more and more social, having a picture on your site becomes more and more important. Letting others see who is behind the site, letting your visitors know there is a real person involved goes a long way toward building the know, like and trust factor. But does it have to be (or should it even be) a professional portrait?

Does it have to be a professional portrait? No. Definitely not.

Whether or not it should be a professional portrait depends upon whether you have anyone around who can take a decent picture of you. With digital cameras offering 8, 10 and up megapixels in resolution, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have someone take a great picture of you for free.

Most important, however, is that the picture actually look like you! The real you!

This is the picture I use here and everywhere else the web asks me for a picture of myself. It is not a professional portrait – it was taken in my kitchen by a friend using my digital camera.

The best advice I ever got regarding taking a picture for my site was this: “Go take a shower, do your hair, put on your face and get dressed – do whatever you would do if you were going to meet a client in person. Then, smile and have someone take a picture of you. You want your picture on your site to look like the person they’d meet in person.”

This is the real me – at least the me that would show up to meet you in person. (It is not the me that sits here in the office in her pajamas, hair in a cock-eyed ponytail on top of her head, though. That me might be a tad too ‘real’ for publication. LOL)

Remember to smile! Big!

I remember when I was standing there waiting for my friend to take the picture, I was concentrating on smiling, but not too much. But when I looked at the picture, my face was almost deadpan. So, I smiled bigger, and that was better, but still not great. It wasn’t until I smiled so big that I felt silly that I got this picture, which is finally the right amount of smile to put on the web. Smiling is important. You look friendly, approachable and it helps build that ‘know, like and trust’ factor.

Whether you take the picture yourself or have one taken by a professional, remember to reduce it’s size before you put it on your site. You don’t want people to have to wait while all those megapixels take their sweet time to display. A resolution of 72dpi is just fine for the net, and a picture 200 by 300 pixels is probably big enough for your site.

It’s a good idea, too, then to use that same picture everywhere on the web that asks for a picture of you. It helps build recognition for you and makes setting up profiles on all those social media and social networking sites easier, too.

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