Maybe someone will find this useful....
http://frankpetronio.com -- since 1995, last major design was in 2005 using Movable Type and static photo galleries, all W3C compliant (although only XHTML 1.0 Transitional but it was 2005). The standards-based approach and lean design/sizes makes the site very search engine friendly and it gets about 600 real visits per day, the best that I can tell. I'm not going to change this design until Movable Type goes out of business and the software becomes outdated, I'm happy with the design (even if I could now go with larger images). I have over 500 blog posts... so far ;-) Comment spam is a pain but my filters are set high and I approve everything, but I still catch a few legit comments in the 20-30 spam comments I get daily.
http://frankpetronio.net -- I felt that I needed a Flash site for client friendly presentations, now that Flash is less of a burden than a few years ago. Dripbook is a portfolio networking site aimed at the fashion industry. It cost about $225/yr and I'm on both the Dripbook site and my own URL. It is easy to update using a web browser and it shows up in searches readily. Dripbook seems to give me everything I need and want for a fraction of the price of LiveBooks.
http://www.dripbook.com/ip/petronio/ -- my iPhone gallery. Automated through Dripbook, it works well and is lightening fast.
http://frankpetronio.blogspot.com/ -- a free Blogger site for family snaps. It works really well and I like the Blogger templates design-wise. Seriously I think a lot of photographers should just use Tumblr and Blogger and to hell with custom half-ass designs.
http://cleanpage.com/ -- I don't actively pursue graphic design and marketing jobs these days but I don't reject them either. This site is the same guts as the fp.com site but much smaller. I put everything a potential client needs to see on one page, including my design portfolio, the rest is just reinforcement.
I have a few friends' sites hosted on my server package and the Word Press sites have been a PITA because of security flaws, spam, etc. I like the options in Word Press but because it is so popular it gets targeted more.
Nowadays I use GoDaddy for domain names. Simple, just don't fall for their added value BS.
My biggest headache is hosting, I hate my current host, Media Temple, which was the darling of the web guru set back in the mid-2000s. But like the couple of hosts before it, they start out awesome and go downhill in a few years. MT is SLOW, has a lot of downtime, and they had a hacker break into a lot of sites, including mine. If it wasn't such a pain to transfer everything I would have switched two years ago.
The best host that I have found, at the moment, until they go to Hell like all the others, is
http://pair.com/
My suggestion to a lot of photographers who are green with all of this is to build a Facebook page with a couple of galleries and some text. That will help them decide what works online for their work, sequences, reactions, etc. Once they master a social networking site then they can tackle a custom site.
Second step is to do something like DripBook and Blogger. I am not so convinced you need a custom website anymore. People don't want to wade through the overdesigned Flash bull**** or the lame homemade efforts most photographers subject them to. I wouldn't design from scratch right now myself. I don't think you can do a better scratch design than Blogger or Live Books or any of the successful web apps like that.
Do get a good logo (that works at web sizes) and pick a good business name. Spend money on nice business cards. Print your stationary on your inkjet.
I don't design websites anymore (I was a CD at a dot.com in the day) and I honestly don't know where to start with modern coding. I'm good w strategy and usability and yelling at people ;-)
Years ago I tried to tackle cameraquest.com and was overwhelmed, gave up. I think that site will never be redesigned because it would be a massive expensive job. He basically needs to start over except there really isn't a good reason -- it isn't well designed or coded but it works and get's a lot of hits. Look at Ken Rockwell, Luminous Landscape, these awful vBulletin forum boards, others -- they are all awful from a design POV -- but they are very successful sites.
In other words, design is dead. A lot of the best designed sites have little or very narrow content, such as commercial photographers trying to flog their wares to a skeptical audience. But a site like Cameraquest's doesn't need a perfect design or a lot of overhead, since the content is so good that people overlook the missing or messed up things about the site.
