Using my knowledge of IT thought it would be useful to share my thought processes on how I designed/built my website for photography.
First of all there is no need to build your website from scratch anymore unless you have a specific task to perform that cannot be done by the Content Management System (CMS)
Traditionally when I build websites I nearly always use Drupal CMS, but for my website I am using WordPress CMS. The reason for this is as follows.
The biggest benefit of Drupal is its powerful permissions system, which makes it very useful if you want to allocate different people different permissions for building the website. There is also an excellent community out there to help and support you. But on the downside it is a steep learning curve and I haven’t found a suitable app to allow me to make posts from my mobile phone.
WordPress has a fanstastic app for Android phones and I dont need a powerful permission system as I am going to be the only one to edit and manage the website. I am sure WordPress has a good permission system but this is the first time I have used wordpress for nearly 2 years. So I am still learning loads.
What I like about word press is the mobile phone app which is what I am using now to type this page up.
If you are thinking of having your own website for photography I strongly recommend WordPress, to set up is fairly easy and there is a fanstatic community available to support you.
There is a wealth of themes you can use to find the style you want, I am using Suffusion for the desktop website and WPtouch to allow my website to display cleanly on mobile phones.
Let me know if would like a more in depth tutorial on setting up a website to display your photos or for setting up a new business, having said that there are plenty of tutorials out there for wordpress just use google or go to http://www.wordpress.org
One final note you have two options for hosting, you can either use wordpress own hosting facilities for free or you can buy your own domain name and hosting space as I have done.
Have fun and happy snapping.