My Media Creation Tools and Services Picks 
I put up my first Web site in 1997 to prove that I could, using a research paper I wrote to graduate, Notepad, early Photoshop at a friends house for the buttons and a Learn HTML in 24 Hours book.  Since then, my photography has followed the shift from film to digital to the Web, we rarely hear, "h t t p colon forward slash forward slash w w w dot [anything]", and I've stockpiled enough good and bad experiences that I want to pass some of them on to you to keep you from stepping in some of the same holes.  Here are some of the things I've learned about getting images onto the Web to show and sell.
The usual disclaimers include that this list is nowhere near exhaustive - or even a cross-section; your mileage will vary; I will likely have left off your favorite tool or service provider and the other usual suspects, and you may violently disagree with some of my opinions.
That said, the list below was prompted by my offer to discuss with my camera club, the Gaithersburg Camera Club of central MD,  what I've experienced en route to exhibiting and selling images on the Web, and creating a few sites.  These things work for me, and I hope you find a tidbit or two to make your trek up the hill a little easier and more productive.  Enjoy!
Product or Service Provider Comments
Domain Name (URL) Registration Network Solutions, Inc. The original domain name registrar with a great reputation. I began using them in 1997, but moved some domains to Arvixe in 2011 to evaluate their services. Free or cheap domain names as a promo for a hosting contract sound too good to be without strings, but I still have full administrative control of the domains I moved to Arvixe. They even include one free domain name with their hosting packages.  Will you be able to point your soon-to-be-famous-and-profitable Web identify to another host if you change hosting companies? I'm going to transfer the free domaine name from Arvixe back to NSI as a test and will update this with the results.   

Before you commit to a host and register your quite-literally-one-in-the-world domain name, search for any horror stories out there about people being locked into substandard hosting providers in order to preserve their domain names.  I can't give you any war stories; only the old adage about things that look too good to be true... You can register your Web identity with NSI for $20 a year if you do it for five years at the time, or for an advertised $10.00 a year through Arvixe. I'm looking for the drawbacks of moving away from NSI, but haven't seen any so far. NSI appears to be mostly marketing these days, with the good deals reserved for new customers, while existing customers pay full price for everything.

Web Hosting Providers Network Solutions, Inc.
IX Web Hosting
Gate

I know from personal experience that Arvixe, Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI), and Gate are reputable.  I still host a client's site on Gate. I switched from Gate to IX Web Hosting years ago because Gate didn't support an image sales application I used briefly, but IX gave me email trouble they couldn't resolve so I moved hosting to NSI and stayed until my 2011 move to Arvixe. Arvixe is new to me, but was recommended by a friend who hosts his main business there. I moved my hosting to them in 2011 after I got fed up with NSI's pricing model that abuses current customers.
Pricing varies, but NSI tends to be about double the going 2012 basic hosting rates of $50-60 a year. I can't tell what their value differentiator is any longer.

Go kick the tires, read the reviews and discussions, and make your choice.   
Commercial Gallery Providers  photo.net
PBase

BetterPhoto.com
Similar in many respects. Personal taste will dictate your choice.
Custom Gallery Templates EOS Template  
by Peter Berger
Flexible and powerful within a narrow range. End of life except for Mark of Dawn Kelly Photography, who is introducing a few new features depending on the community's interest in them. Configurable as both gallery-only and with a shopping cart for sales. Be willing to learn to modify HTML and Javascript. Have a look at my favorite gallery of our adventures in China.

I'm looking for a new setup that will let me integrate my primary site seamlessly with a flexible sales function. My site is rather dated, but I haven't found any packages in the affordable range that provide sales flexibility and an integrated look and feel.
Free BreezeBrowser Templates  
by Peter Berger
Film Strip template is free and unique. Uses pop-up windows for full-size views.
AllWebCo Tremendous selection for most conceivable purposes. Many have a shopping cart that can be used or hidden. Require some HTML and Javascript modification. See KollinsLandscaping.com for a sample.  

The main drawback is that the gallery isn't database driven so updating a lot of images is cumbersome.

Commercial Print Sales Online Storefront Provider PhotoReflect Used them for several seasons of summer sports photo sales. They pay timely. Their service fee is a 15% commission on your  retail prices + 3% credit card processing, but no monthly fees. Try All American Photo, one of their Labtricity affiliates, to do your printing if you go with PhotoReflect.  

The good news is that they do most of the work of getting your images into your customers' hands and the revenue into your pocket. The service, as you'd expect, isn't free, but may be well worth the price if you want to sell your work without becoming a HTML-and-Javascript-editing-Web-geek.  Both Action Photos, which I've had the privilege to shoot for on a number of occasions, and my friend Andy of ProImagesOnline, whom I got to know at those events, use PhotoReflect.  Action Photos is bringing a new custom-written sports photography environment online, but don't try this at home.  

I recently had the privilege of meeting - and buying some photographs from - Joe and Stacey Champion of Champion Images.  Champion specializes in athletic event coverage but adds Stacey's artistic eye to produce some of the most striking sports images I've seen.  They use PhotoReflect for sales, nestled behind a custom front end.  Stop by their booth if you're at a major USA Gymnastics meet or any other event where you see their remarkable creations on display.  In the meantime, visit them here.

ProImagesOnline covers the southern Maryland sporting world and Action Photos focuses on major tournaments in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

Print Sales Software EOS Template A wonderful dual purpose app for exhibit-only AND sales galleries. One gallery can even be either, depending on the way your hyperlink to it is set up. Lots of navigation and sales options, and produces razor sharp galleries very quickly when used with BreezeBrowser Pro. The shopping cart works with PayPal.  Peter Berger, EOS' developer, has gone full time into pro photography and no longer offers feature enhancements.  Look at Peter's work and you'll understand why.  Others have picked up the support baton so EOS is still every bit as viable a gallery creation tool as it ever was.  An active Yahoo forum provides support in the form us active contributors and some super moderators.  

Sincere thanks to Peter for getting the software off the ground and sticking with it to its pretty mature stage of development.  Bravo, Peter.

Everyone has their favorite sales application or service; so will you after you try one, two or more.  Each has strengths and weaknesses and I've seen no panacea.  Decide what you want in terms of look and feel, your personal time commitment to get up and running, time commitment to upload events, customization possibilities, up-front cost, annual recurring cost and sales
commissions. You'll discover a trade-off that you'll spend a lot of late nights researching.  You'll read posts of praises and pans for any of the competitors.  Have fun on your quest, but make a decision and jump into the water.  The decision you make today isn't irreversible, probably won't be terribly expensive and is subject to change at your whim!

Image Viewing, Workflow and Gallery Generation Application BreezeBrowser Pro Can’t say enough good about it. Good opening speed for viewing of 10MB D2X RAW files, plus JPEGs and TIFFs. Not the greatest RAW converter (try DxO), but great viewer. Excels at Web gallery generation, and is worth the $79 for that, alone. Big feature is that is allows separate sharpening settings for thumbnails and full-size images, and all on one pass! Batch renaming, too.
Downloader Pro Revolutionizes the way you drag from your card reader onto your HDD. Renames on the way over to put an event name, camera model number or anything else in the file name. Canon shooters will love the way it moves all of the images from all of your 100-image folders in a single click. Try it even if you don’t get BreezeBrowser; it’s a standalone application.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imagery Photomatix Pro Highlights and shadows in the same scene too far apart for your camera's sensor?  Combine the best of several different exposures into striking images using HDR imaging.  I use it on a regular basis for about anything that will be still long enough for five images.  This is tripod territory, and auto-bracketing of 2/3 to 1 stop with a 5- or 7-frame motor burst works very well.  I've put a few images here to give you an idea. 

Summer, 2009 Update: This application gets better with every revision.  I just installed the 64-bit v3.2.  There are a few bugs I'm documenting to send to HDRSoft, but the improved light smoothing alone is a major improvement in the ability to generate realistic looking images quickly. More people are starting to use HDR to generate unrealistic images, too - you get the full range here.
Panoramas and Virtual Reality (VR) Nodal Ninja 5 panorama head
PTgui panorama stitcher
PTViewer panorama viewer
You want to show your audience more than your camera will take in in a single image, so what do you do?

Easy - you take two or more photos and combine them so that they look like one very wide, or very tall photo.  Software to do this is plentiful; search on panorama software reviews to read the latest reviews.  The Nodal Ninja site has 1,400+ links to panorama-related information.  Go to the bottom for forum, discussion group and blog links.

The two basic ways to present your expanded view of your subject are with either a wide or tall print or rectangular Web image, or through a Virtual Reality (VR) viewer that lets your Web audience look around the image - up to 360 degrees around, from straight up to straight down. Good VR is fascinating, challenging and very rewarding with even your earliest efforts.  Have a look at my first attempt after unpacking my Nodal Ninja 5 panorama head.

Photofinishers White House Custom Color
Mpix
Bay Photo Lab

All American Photo
I've had good success with all four labs.  Always use the "pro" side of the house.  They have different tools to edit and upload, including my favorite - ftp.  Chose between doing your own color correction and formatting, or paying the lab to do it.  I use All American through PhotoReflect, and go directly to the other three.  Set up a PhotoReflect account and select All American from their LabTricity labs to give them a try.  I'm looking at a stack of test prints and see only subtle differences between them, and they're all work I'm proud to deliver to customers.  Technology has had a big positive impact on the photofinishing business, too.

Be careful of your monitor calibration! Use a hardware colorimeter, and send for test prints before you do any customer work or order a large number of prints for yourself.  I use a colorimeter from x-rite that was relatively inexpensive, helps ensure repeatable results and saves a lot of rework and frustration.

Summer, 2009 Update: WHCC continues to impress me and has become my lab of choice.

Slide Show and Video Creation ProShow Gold

and how I got it to install under 64-bit Vista

Never thought I'd use "slide show software". The nudge to try it was my agreeing to produce the slide show for the annual swim team banquet.  I detest mediocrity and set out to put together an above-average show with lots of images, quick transitions, Ken Burns panning and even some miniDV footage.  This way outside of PowerPoint's league, and I had heard someone at Gaithersburg Camera Club praise ProShow Gold - so gave it a try.  700+ images and 100+ hours later, we had a high-energy 30-minute show complete with soundtrack; all on a DVD.  

It has a steep learning curve for its slicker features like layers and motion, but turns out a decent end product.  The shows took a long time to render on a 1-processor Athlon 2500 with 1GB (part of the final step in burning them to DVD), but are pretty quick on an Intel quad-core with 4GB (~15 minutes to an ISO file - see below).  I have no knowledge of any competitive product like Adobe Premier or the Apple's iDVD, but plan to stick with this one for my occasional need.  Its output looks great projected by a big Christie projector onto a 14-ft screen at church, too.  Their latest release is touted to burn to Blu-ray disks.

Hint for higher picture quality: Chose the "Desaturate to 80% (or so - it's variable)" option for a DVD show for your TV or PC, but leave saturation at 100% for projection to give yourself much more vibrant on-screen images.  A few trials will help you dial it in to your taste.

To save your sanity - output your show to an ISO image and burn that to DVD using ImgBurn. ProShow has a terrible inability - in my case - to reliably get a show to DVD.