Far from pretending to be an expert in web design, after having spent more then 6 months designing this website I thought I would share the experience that I gained in the process.

I have made three attempts at getting a website to expose my photographic work online.
The very first one was quite a few years ago when I had only just started in photography and was still shooting print films! I tried to design it from scratch myself but I didn't get very far with it as other things became higher in my priority list (like improving my photographic skills and building up a library of good pictures!). But at least I did come up with a general idea about a design I liked.
My second attempt was a lot more successful but I was never fully satisfied with it. As I couldn't find time to design my own site but was quite exited about getting my photos neatly displayed on the net, I opted for web service from Clickpic. They provide a set of various web page design for photographers and for a relatively small fee per year, the photographers simply need to upload their pictures, organise them in specific galleries and add a bit of text and all the rest is done for you. This worked well and allowed me to start showing my pictures on the net without too much effort. However, I could only have one version in English, was very limited with the design styles, found that the pictures were two small, and most of all, felt that my site lacked individualism (as many others could use the exact same design).

So following more and more positive feedback about my pictures and as I started to build up a reasonable set of good pictures I finally decided to spend the time to come up with my own brewed site.

To come up with this design, I have looked at many other photographer's website first. Then I tried to use the good things about them for inspiration and took good note of the things I didn't like to ensure I wouldn't make the same mistakes. A few things that I thought important were:

• Easy and intuitive browsing, especially on the gallery pages. I have seen so many photographer's website where going from one image to the next involves so many mouse clicks that the viewers must get tired very quickly.
• Include a good level of information about each picture, both descriptive and technical. "A picture is worth a thousand words" is what we normally here. Although this can be true in some cases, I however, find important to provide some background details about the pictures which give more information about what it is about, where and when it was taken, say what the picture doesn't (indeed sometimes the beauty of a picture can hide a whole different story!), etc. Then it is up to the viewer to read them depending on there interest. As for the technical side, this is one of the way I have learned and taught myself photography, i.e. by looking at how other people do things and with what. So for those learning photography I provide for each picture some basic information about the equipment I used, exposure setting, filters, etc.
• I also wanted to use my website not only to show a selection of my best pictures but as well a source of photographic information. So I included the technical section where so far I provide some equipment review, a few thoughts about equipment in general and this very article on photographic website design. I hope to add more in the future on light, composition, etc.
• And then the whole thing had to be quick to upload without compromising the quality of the pictures (so no fancy animation or things like that) and it would have to be reasonably easy to maintain

These were the starting point of what I wanted in my website. Then as I knew very little in terms of web design before starting building the website I learned as I went along.

One of the first thing I did was search the net for help and one of the useful thing I did find was this good ebook: "A Photographer's Guide to Web Site Design". It helped me get a reasonable idea of what I could do and how I should do it.
This ebook does present various design tools alternatives. I didn't really want to spend money on expensive web design tools (like FrontPage or the like) as I knew that it wasn't necessary and that it wouldn’t help me that much. So I started looking at alternatives.
My final tools of choice have ended up being:

• Eclipse: as the software development environment.
• Photoshop: for all the graphic work
• SmartFTP: for deploying the website to the server
• W3 Schools: used as the main web design learning source

Eclipse:
This is a free software development environment, used with the Web Tools Platform which provides a web application development environment. I mainly used this for the good html editor and the nice front end which I find useful to organise the project files. This development tool also provides deployment mechanisms but I haven't managed to get it working (the help is not of the most explicit) and I have ended up using SmartFTP instead to transfer all my files directly onto my server.

Photoshop:
The photo editing software I use for all my graphic work.

FileZila:
This is a complete, but very simple and easy to use free FTP program. I use it to uplaod my website on to my server.

W3 Schools:
This is by far the best source on the internet for learning the basics of all the various web design languages and techniques. It proposes tutorials for each. They are very simple and quick to follow and provide plenty of useful examples. This is what I have used to learn html, xhtml, css, javascripts, and xml.