Right, Ive never looked into costs of paying someone to design a site before, so know nothing of the costs etc.  I know that doing things on the cheap can end up with results that are worse than if you did it yourself.

I want to put together a site like http://www.eol.org or http://www.carabusonline.co.uk, but covering pretty much all microscopic life in the British Isles, well, microscope photos of them.

I knocked this up earlier in the year:

http://www.microphoto.co.uk/

The system I came up with using Drupal isnt the most efficient, and it doesnt look as good as carabusonline. Im pretty sure they use drupal too.

Im curious whether it would cost a lot of money to pay a designer to use Drupal to come up with an easy and efficient website for adding photos. £100? £250? £500? £1000? If it was commercial and ultimately made money through sponsorship and/or advertising, would they want a cut of the profits?

You pay for the design, not for them to make money off you

What problems are you finding with Drupal? Ive no experience of it personally as Im a Wordpress/Joomla user, but from what I gather its supposed to be as good in terms of functionality as those but maybe slightly trickier to get to grips with than Wordpress.

Backend management in Wordpress is brilliant, maybe you should set a tester up and see if you prefer the interface? If its a big project youre doing (which it seems to be) it would make sense to have an interface streamlined/easier to use for your purpose.

As Bacon says, you pay for the design or development to an extent, a web development company shouldnt be seeking to profit from your website in any shape or form other than a credits link.

I wouldnt pay any more than £250 for what you want, but then thats probably about what I would charge to do it lol. Some companies think they can charge you £1k for a brochure site and usually they end up churning out sh*te. Cheap doesnt always mean poor quality, youll find an independent web designer will do more, better quality and for less than a company.

Ive tried Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal for what I want. Theyve all had bits and pieces which I found were excellent for what I wanted, but flaws in other areas.

Joomla - Im familiar with it, its popular with lots of extensions and modules for it. Downside was the lack of a suitable categorisation system (RE: Taxonomy)
Wordpress - Quick and easy to set up, easy to add content. Again the navigation system was a let down.
Drupal - the big selling point was the "taxonomy" module. As I want to organise the species taxonomically, it just fits. Problem is "slightly trickier to get to grips with" is an understatement.

Basically the main thing that is needed is a taxonomic/hierarchal menu system, like on www.microphoto.co.uk However I have butchered what I am sure sure be possible to generate automatically. Content was stored hierarchally when I did that site, but the pages treat it pretty much as individual pages, meaning I had to edit links manually etc.

Im sure partly I didnt get how to use the taxonomy module properly, and ended up using a different module which has made it impossible to use taxonomy without a major overhaul. When D7 comes along that will be when the overhaul happens.

I also need a better system of generating thumbnails and the images in question. My original plan was to use flickr, but after I was halfway through I found the bits in the small print that prevent you using it commercially. So I can use flickr, but only if I dont have advertising on my website. So as it stands theres a flickr group, people put photos into the group, I save the original + thumbnail, and they are hosted on my server, with the html inserted by hand.

Ultimately I want to have a content addition page where I select the family/genus etc the species belongs to, put the photo in an upload box, upload it, and it automatically makes the thumbnail.

I know its all doable, and probably quite easily, its my curse in that I find I have just enough tech knowledge to understand what is possible, and semi-how it is done, but no where near enough to be able to do these things myself.

Thanks for that. Ill take a gander at that list when Im not *at work*

As to those 2 galleries, they look good, but arent suitable. What I need when I say about the taxonomy, is the ability to have galleries within galleries.

Using the petrslavik site as an example (isnt he the one that won that photo competition and then was disqualified?):

http://petrslavik.eu/en/photo-galleries/ethiopian-wildlife

So here we have the Ethiopian wildlife gallery in the photo galleries section. What Id need is extra galleries off of this, so:

Photo galleries -> Ethiopian wildlife -> Insects -> Beetles -> Carabus -> Carabus vulgaris
Photo galleries -> Ethiopian wildlife -> Insects -> Beetles -> Carabus -> Carabus squarrosus
Photo galleries -> Ethiopian wildlife -> Insects -> Beetles -> Cicindela -> Cicindela campestris
Photo galleries -> Ethiopian wildlife -> Insects -> Spiders -> etc -> etc etc
Photo galleries -> Ethiopian wildlife -> Insects -> Flies -> etc -> etc etc

Theres a reason why CarabusOnline only focuses on Carabid beetles, the scope of what Im after is huge, but thankfully restricted by only wanting MicroScope imagery. I am starting to wonder why Ive decided this as image quality wise some people with £2000 SLR kit can produce a better image than I can using a microscope...

I got a bit bored last night and started to work on the new site.

http://www.microphoto.co.uk/

Id like to thank everyone for their helpful suggestions, I doubt Id have started on it last night without many of the suggestions poking me in the right direction. Its early days yet as Ive only had time to put a tiny bit of sample content up so I can sort the layouts out (which Ill make a start on tonight probably), but the system looks so much more promising than the old one

All in good time! Bare in mind Im meant to be working 9-5.30, Ive only worked on the site for 2 hours so far from installing drupal, can only work on it at evenings and weekends!

As I said, the stuff on there at the mo is just so I can get everything sorted, I needed to make sure the structure was right, next up is editing the template to get rid of half the text that appears under the thumbnails etc. Then Ill be onto the searching and keywords etc so that theres a quick and easy way to get to the stuff people want. Things like the book style areas are something that can be created later once the content is there with descriptions etc. Technically the target audience of the site isnt Joe Blogs, its people with an entomological background that are looking for confirmation of IDs on samples theyve got. There are sites out there which cater to certain groups, but not everything, and not specifically imagery through microscopes.

The main reason Im re-doing the site is because the way it was before meant that the search function wouldnt work properly, so I fully intend on enabling searching once I get that far

The ultimate objective of the site is to get Bournemouth Unis invert collections on the system, perhaps the Bournemouth Natural Sciences Societys collection too, and then hopefully other collections and other peoples images through flickr, if I do end up unemployed over winter Ill use it as an opportunity to network with the Natural History Museum if I can get access to photograph some of their collections. Once theyre on Im hoping there will be enough content and interest to start to add related content such as microscopy advice etc. Ive got interest from the entomologists at uni, but its getting the site to that level first. Im hoping that I might ultimately be able to get some sponsorship from various places to pay for the running costs of the site, as ultimately youre right, the tree will be effing huge if I manage to get even a fraction of the critters of the UK on there.

I dont think Drupal is OTT for what I need, the acquia bit is, but as its free (unless you want some perks, which I dont) it doesnt hurt. I mean, its saying something when other taxonomic directories use Drupal.

Its a challenge to learn all the coding, but I keep surprising myself, Im just not patient enough half the time prompting many help threads soon followed by "NM, Im a numpty" posts

For what its worth, my original attempt, which took a long time to get sorted, is here:

http://zpyder.co.uk/micro/

The fact it has more content on it (at the moment) aside, I do think the new version is miles better, not only does it look better IMO, but the fact that I can search the images now helps a lot