Hi folks,
I'm a web developer and amateur photographer, so I'll drop in and add another perspective.
I think most of you have the right idea by looking for an out-of-the-box solution, like Wordpress or Zenfolio, and then customizing it.
I strongly recommend against a "homegrown solution." I'm not saying that it can't fulfill someone's needs in the short term, but there are a lot of pitfalls:
1. You have to learn HTML and CSS, at least well enough to copy and paste. The problem is that you won't be very good at web design, so you will eventually get stuck fighting the quirks of those languages. If you want any dynamic features on your site (e.g. click on a thumbnail to open up a larger image in the same page), then you will also need to learn some Javascript. That's 3 languages.
2. If you spend time to learn HTML and CSS in order to become good with them... is that actually an efficient use of your time for your business? Are you excited about layout and typography? If you plan on doing a lot of web design, maybe it's worthwhile. But if you are a pro photographer, it's probably not efficient to learn web design just to make your portfolio site. Your time is probably best spent on actually doing photography and marketing.
3. Your homegrown solution will be brittle and difficult to maintain if its bigger than 2 pages. For instance, say you have images with a caption that appears on multiple pages. If you want to change the caption in static HTML, you have to change it on all those pages. In a CMS ("Content Management System") like Wordpress, you only have to change the caption once, and the change gets reflected everywhere. This saves you a bunch of searching through pages and copy/pasting, which is time-consuming and error prone. There is a reason that pro web developers don't make sites in static HTML anymore.
4. You can't store any data, like customer data.
Wordpress is a better solution. It's very powerful, and a great solution for someone who wants a highly customized site.
Nevertheless, I think many people would be served by completely prebuilt platforms, like Zenfolio or SquareSpace (
http://www.squarespace.com/).
Here are some issues with Wordpress:
1. Power. Wordpress is very powerful because you have access to the source code. This means that it be customized extensively with themes, plugins, and customizations of those themes and plugins. The problem is that a lot of this power is difficult to harness, and it costs development time. I would question if most photographers actually need the customizability that Wordpress can provide. To harness that power, you need:
2. Themes and plugins. Themes and plugins can be very powerful, but this power comes at a price. First, you have to find the ones you want, and read comparisons/reviews, which can become a massive time-sink itself. Second, themes/plugins can have bugs, or they can be incompatible and break each other.
There may be not way to fix those issues without looking into the code, and you should not be looking at code unless you are a web developer, or you want to become a web developer, or you think code looks pretty.
If you can quickly find the themes and plugins that you like, and they all play nice with each other, then you are golden. But if something goes wrong, then its expensive in developer time.
3. Themes only limited customization options. Some themes are more powerful than others. Zenfolio or SquareSpace may actually have better customization options than many themes. Yes, *in principle* Wordpress and its themes are infinitely customizable, but in practice, this customizability costs developer time, which is expensive.
4. Performance and hosting. Zenfolio and SquareSpace are hosted by those companies, meaning that you don't have to screw around with hosting. Also, those platforms will be optimized for performance. If you are running a small Wordpress site on a single server, and the traffic is low, then performance won't make a difference. But if you are expecting more traffic, and serving many/big images, then performance can become an issue. An advantage of SquareSpace (and Zenfolio, I think) is that they host the images on a CDN (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network) so they can be served quickly. Wordpress can be integrated with a CDN and tuned for performance (I've done it), but you really don't want to be messing around with that unless you are a web developer.
In short, Wordpress is a powerful platform, but unless you get lucky with themes/plugins exactly fitting your needs, then you need to be a developer (or hire one) to get the most out of the platform. The subset of Wordpress that is friendly to non-developers is significantly smaller than the whole thing.
Website platforms like Zenfolio and SquareSpace are not infinitely customizable, because you don't have access to the source code, but I wouldn't rule them out until you've checked out their feature lists and determined something you need that they don't have. You may be also be able to experiment with a developer version free, or at a lower cost and try it out.
These platforms cost a bit more money than self-hosting Wordpress on a crappy server, but they will give you stuff that Wordpress doesn't give you by default: professional-looking web design (you need to pay for a premium theme to get this on Wordpress), a professional interface, and performance / CDN. Their design customizability seems at least as good as Wordpress themes.
If you use Zenfolio or SquareSpace, make sure to get a custom domain name (e.g. yourdomain.com, not yourdomain.zenfolio.com) for credibility. A subdomain of another website doesn't look professional. (If you are hiring someone, make sure that you own the domain, not them.)
Like photography, web development is a craft with a lot of depth. It takes graphic design skills, and also coding skills. I think most professional photographers are smart people, and you probably could develop yourself a portfolio site if you wanted to. BUT, I think you should ask yourself: what is the business justification for taking on this work myself?
If you start doing web development, then you are a GWC ("Guy With Computer" or "Gal with Computer", to spoof the common "Guy With Camera" label). It will take you about 2-20x as long to solve any problem as it would a professional web developer, if you even can. If you spend your own time on web development to "save money," that time isn't free, because you could have instead been spending it on photography or marketing. Even if you aren't writing code, evaluating and installing Wordpress themes and plugins can take monstrous amounts of time.
(Yes, your website will be useful for marketing, but you spending hours on HTML, CSS, or debugging plugins is *not* marketing. It's a distraction from your core competencies.)
So, I strongly suggest that whatever solution you go with, you try to make sure that you don't write any code. I would also advise staying out of .htaccess files, and DNS (domain configuration) records. Unless that stuff excites you, or you are already a programmer, than it's just wasted hours of your life. Some of this stuff is annoying enough even if it's your job. In my experience, being an amateur-level photographer is a lot more rewarding than being an amateur-level web developer/designer.
Let's spin this question around: If a web developer needed some product or corporate photos for a website, would it be a good use of their time to learn photography for that single project? You folks know the answer to that question.
I would strongly recommend that professional photographers strongly consider a professional web developer for their websites. If you are planning on using the website to generate revenue, then it's entirely appropriate that you invest some money into it (and use your time to develop your business, rather than spending it on web development sinkholes). Perhaps you can network with some of the web developers or web development houses in your area, contract them, and then give each other referrals in the future.
If you are a professional photographer, then many of these reasons that people should hire you are also reasons why you should hire a professional web developer. In the case of both photography and web development, a person can wing it themselves, and the quality of the results will vary depending on the time they put into it, their aptitude for the work, and how lucky they get in finding the right tutorials/resources to do what they want.
My advice for photographers would be to evaluate Zenfolio, SquareSpace, or similar solutions, and see if they do what you want. If not, look at Wordpress, and strongly consider hiring a developer to work with it, so you can focus on your core competencies of photography and marketing.
