Website in pampers period

[pixhunter]

Hi all, i have undertaken the adventurous step of building my own website www.keelite.be . It is right now in a very basic begin phase, with only a welcome page and some header images so far, and I'd like to use the epertise of NEMers for suggestions and advise.
I don't consider to make it a blog site, I'd like to show my images in first place with the intention of atracting potential clients, keeping for sure a contact option for interaction with the visitors. I want also to have a corner to feature photographs of fellow local photographers, and another to redirect interested learning photographers to sites I have personal experience with in purchasing gear, finding photographic content, tutorials, tips & tricks etc.
anything you considered interesting or nice to have; or anything you apply successfully in your personal site and you'd like to share will be useful to me.
right now I'm concerned about the loading speed for visitors from all over.
Now, every time you visit the site you'll see a header image, which is randomly chosen from my library, but that I'll change into a gif file so that all images will be presented in a slideshow.
I have ideas but my skills are very low and wordpress has a steep learning curve, or so I feel it.
I'll appreciate your input!!
Tony

[gannet]

Sounds an exciting project. Sorry I can't offer up much but hopefully some others with more experience can, good luck to yer 

[shirlm]

It sounds as if you are building from scratch? IMO that's a really hard way to go.  What about using something  that is pre-designed but you can adjust to suit.  I use Jalbum (http://jalbum.net).  there are hundreds of skins to choose from for the photo album  section and other pages that can be filled with whatever you want.

[oldCarlos]

Good luck with it Tony.

[pixhunter]

Thanks a lot for the encouragement, i'm gonna need it. yes I'm starting from scratch and it's intense & to my unskilled brain definitely challenging; Wordpress has a lot of presets you can adapt, but (there is only one) for noobs it becomes discouraging at a certain point to be constantly obliged to click yourself to death around fora on the www trying to find the solution to what you actually want.

to shirlm, jalbum's price, is that monthly or yearly? just considering a more close to finish thing seriously
Ph

[Greg]

Tony, I don't know a thing about site design and don't want to, but did want to wish you best of luck.

Big help, I know.

[pixhunter]

Thank you Greg! it's very nice frrom you!
Ph