Hey Jessica!
I've been on your site. I'm not a native english-speaker and so I've to tell you, what I've understood... Just to make shure, that I got it right!
Okay - your problem No. 1: For some reason, the gallery I've added to the home page won't show up.
Can I get a link? When I get it right, you maybe think about a (slider?) gallery on all sites? Have you seen this screencast - http://screenr.com/UoRs ? Use this screencast in your backend, which should look like this: http://1.s3.envato.com/files/7079728/images/2_backend.png Take a look at "Default Background Gallery".
Your next point: Also - my images look terrible ...
To be honest: you're right! The images, the clothes and the women are really great. It's a problem with your image-sizes.
First of all - there are two options for the background-slider:
a) full-screen, cropping: this option will "stretch" or "shrink" the images to fit the window of your browser in the width and will crop the top and bottom.
b) full-screen, non cropping: this option will "stretch" or "shrink" the images to fit the window of your browser to the high. The space left and right from the image will be left free.
Option a) is really nice, if you got "landscape"-oriented pictures only - in my opinion. You've to choose a picture, where the motive is in the middle of the picture. If you got fashion-images, most of them will be "portrait"-oriented, Option b) is your friend.
Into deep:
http://loislaine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/bg_lines1.png - make it huge and full-width! Choose option a)
http://loislaine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/bg_slide1_1500x1500.jpg - This is Option b) - see below please! :-)
http://loislaine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ll_ss_01a1.jpg - image to small. Your image is about 400 px, you need 430 px. :-)
If you want to use Option b), you've to think about your visitors screen-resolution. This are my visitors this month (Top10):
1920x1200 27,09%
1280x800 13,26%
1680x1050 12,97%
1280x1024 12,39%
1366x768 7,78%
1920x1080 7,78%
1440x900 7,49%
768x1024 6,05%
2560x1440 5,19%
Your background-image with the beautiful lady is 1500 px high - http://loislaine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/bg_slide1_1500x1500.jpg
You set this image to option a). That's wrong! If your customer has got a notebook with 1920x1200 px, your image will be blown up to the width and cropped on top and bottom. If you want a crisp image, you have to choose option b) and a hight about 1200 px (or lower because, the viewpoint of your browser is smaller). And you have to think about the borders.
My visitors are photo-enthusiast with higher screen-resolutions (as shown above). Most of them will run a fullscreen-browser-window on galleries. So my images are 1440 px high and I've chosen option b). Problem: my image will loose quality with a hight below 1000 px.
I've you want to see my homepage, copy this to your clipboard:
uggc://jjj.xvryubea-cubgb.qr
and paste it here:
http://www.rot13.de
Then you'll get the right URL.
I hope, that'll help you. If not - ask me... :-)
Greetings from Germany
Dennis