I love learning Maya and working with web design, and I’d like to combine my two hobbies by showing some of my CG work on my website. I’m much more savvy as to coding and design than as to actual site maintenance and traffic handling, so here are some extremely newbie questions for people who use the internet to post both animations and still renders:

1. How do you like to balance resolution and file size?
2. How do you like to make short animations available to site viewers (e.g. embedding w/ or w/o controls, etc.)?
3. I know that anyone determined to copy/steal images can usually find a way to do so, but are there any tricks you like to use to discourage this?
4. How do you keep from going beyond your server quota?
5. Any other comments or things you would have liked to have known when you were first learning about posting your art to the web would also be appreciated.

Thanks a bunch for any input you have--the more people I can hear from, the better!
Happy new year to all!

I know this is an old post but for anyone else that may want answers to these questions.

1: Use jpeg files for images of your work and create smaller sized versions for thumbnails that link to the full size image.  (i often see sites where people use the html to downsize a larger picture for use as a thumbnail - which really defeats the point)

2: Use Flash - it’s easy to setup something like a slideshow and embed it into your page.

3: you can write some code to stop visitors from using right click (stops some casual users), you can also encript your source code. 
Another thing to do which is VERY important if you have your work within folders on your site - make a page within all folders that are used for content (by this i mean all folders that DO NOT have html pages in but you use them to organise things like videos, images, and such) you use called index.htm that will re-direct to your homepage.  Otherwise people will be able to view all the files within that folder easily.

4: If your site increases in popularity that much then just get a better hosting plan.