The whole point of having a pic is so people can see who they're getting.
Jeans? Haven't we all seen those $2500 portraits in some of our customer's homes? You know, the ones where the family is sitting on some dune at the beach and everyone is wearing jeans? They tend to be rather wealthy and educated. Jeans can work, a suit and tie can work, a uniform can work. I think the bigger question is does it make you look like a professional people can trust and do you look like the happy, positive, honest type of operator people feel comfortable around in their home.
Just my preference, but I like more casual, less staged images of people in real life, with big, inviting smiles, well groomed, and approachable.
And, as far as too many words, I've been trying to revamp our webpage for a few months, in part, because I think there's too much stuff. Some of our customers, on the other hand, say they called because we had so much information. Hmmmm.....
Some folks are interested enough to read everything you want to say about your business. Some don't. The ones who don't won't read it. As long as your site is well laid out and easy to navigate and your individual pages aren't ten screens deep I don't see a problem. It's information. You wouldn't throw out the entire set of encylopedias if you were only looking for some little tidbit on carpet cleaning, why assume volumes of easy-to-sift-through information on a web site is necessarily a problem. We are not our customers and we don't think like them. Don't confuse the two.
While I tend not to go as deep as I used to we've had good results from short copy as well as long copy (in print and online) and you'll find "experts" on both sides of the argument.