The best of the most fundamental requirements are listed in Jörg Colberg's post. Whether you are inclined to design your own site or subscribe to a host with site templates provided, the points mentioned are of relative and optimum importance. One other thing I think photographers/bloggers should be aware of is that "quantity does not always equal exposure". There are some bloggers who have a front page with anywhere from one to twenty images, thinking they're better exposing their photography on a global network by having a high quantity of images. What they need to understand is that time is money (money out and money in) visitors are less inclined to wait for numerous images to download and if they're like me they'll just close the tab/window or browser altogether. I would suggest after deigning a site or choosing a site template, you clock your site download times on various browsers MSIE, Firefox, Netscape, Opera etc to ensure your pages are not consuming exorbitant amounts of visitor’s time and money downloading. (Of course it is relative to your connection speed but have you ever considered how much money you're spending waiting for sites/images/text to download when you access a URL?) Functionality is the absolutely important though I would suggest simplicity is also.

If you have a blog with Wordpress on a server shared with few resources and this plugin will interest you, this is WP Super Cache, this plug-in creates static html pages from the dynamic pages generated by Wordpress, these dynamic pages are generated stored on your server to decrease by up to 80% der server load, because of this that instead of generating a dynamic page for every page request to the server is static HTML page.