Thank you. It's not a simple matter and it takes a lot of time, but it can be done correctly. I remember my last attempt:

It was horrible and I was very discouraged, however now with Photoshop CS3 Extended and ImageReady, I feel I can do almost anything with images. I'd still like to get my current avatar better though. There's still some white crap on the edges. It just takes time. I must have put 2 hours into the one I have now. It takes time to delete all the backgrounds while maintaining the character's position as well as resizing the image and reformatting it to a different format. Then you've gotta preserve the transparency when making the gif image. If you don't, it looks horrible.