i built mine with photoshop and dreamweaver. My hosting company gave free software a few years ago so I also got some nice flash gallery stuff for free. So my site is completely built by me but it doesn't look half bad, if I do say so myself.
www.photokisses.com for those interested.
Check out the very first post in the wedding photographer forum. It has a list of popular sites that many people use for website building. With flash and the templates they have now you could put together a website in no time if you had the pictures ready etc.
Good luck
Doug
1- get it designed & hosted by someone else
2- learn all the scripting & designing needed, then either host it somewhere or learn to manage a server and host it yourself.
I've been doing #2, gives me such flexibility, and an extra off site backup server. But now not having enough time, I'm gonna get someone else to do it.
Have a pro make it if you want it to be good. I would only do what you are good at, and if you are not a designer, then leave really important things like creating a logo and a web site to a pro. The template website thing is not the best idea since a whole lot of shooters sites all look very similar. When you are branding yourself the last thing you want to do is cut corners and do something cheap looking. If you end up doing it yourself, at least pay a good pro to critique it.
At first, I did my own using FrontPage as the html editor and Xara Webstyles for the templates and graphics. Both are fairly cheap and easy to use, but they do require a bit of extra work to look clean (at least for me). I just opened up a Photobiz account yesterday, which didn't take long at all to set up and get going. I'm just doing some fine tuning before I publish it.
Bottom line, if you have the tools, the time and the knowledge (or desire to learn the tools), you can do it cheaper yourself in the long run. But sites like Bludomain and Photobiz make it real easy and fairly cheap. And they look good too. :0
Take a look at Portfoliositez. They have decent templates, good customer service, and decent pricing. Unless you're a graphic designer, don't do it yourself.
Tony, it seems like you are probably the exception to the "get it done by a pro if you want a professional looking site" rule. Your site is awesome and unique.
I've typically always made my own sites, but finally caved for a blu site (not finished yet). It takes a bit of time to get used to not having complete and utter control of everything, but it's also nice to not have to worry about it.
My biz partner and I did ours by ourself plus help from a few friends. We did mockups of everything in photoshop and illustrator then took those designs and with help from some friends we put them in to dreamweaver and then also got some javascript plugins. Our site is nowhere near what we want it to be but it is usable right now although we need to update/change our galleries and how they load (progressive jpegs).
www.ThirdElementStudios.com
we also use www.Fotki.com for our client proofing/ordering and www.blogspot.com for our blog
