I do a mix of easy clean text ones, middle of the road graphical ones, and heavy intensive graphic ones. I like to have that variety. I've learned a lot in the few months doing adult pages. My first galleries and pages completely suck compared to what I do now. I'm actually embarrassed by what I used to think was a good page...hopefully I'll just keep getting better
Programs I use:
Dreamweaver MX (the best html program out there). I used to be a notepad writing webpage designer, but this is quicker and it writes fairly clean code. A lot better than most wysiwyg editors + you can still write code with one flip of the view. Some say there's a learning curve with this, but if you handcode in notepad you'll have no problem with it. Only people that don't know html have that learning curve thing with this program.
Photoshop CS (You can make complete pages there and in time they're quicker to make then html ones). Also use this to create your thumbs. It takes a little more time than the batch processing programs, but the results are really worth it. You can also automate a lot of the commands to speed up the process.
Image Ready - It does some things that photoshop can't. Pretty easy to make basic animated gifs in it as well.
Arles Image Web Creator - I use this as well...this is good if you want to knock out quick pages with decent looking thumbs (Photoshop thumbs are way better though). Also good to handle resizing quickly, making up quick tables with photos, etc.
Other graphics programs I use, Ulead 3d, for some quickie 3d graphics.
There's some good tutorials out there that will help you with your gallery making. I'll list a few here:
http://www.freenudegalleries.com/guide/
This guide is one of the best you can find. It really helped me change the way I write galleries. It was posted on another forum (Medium Pimpin)...really an excellent read.
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/des...site-photoshop
If you want the basics of how to design a whole webpage in photoshop that link above is a good place to start. You'll get the basics you need to know about cropping, slicing, etc.
http://share.studio.adobe.com/axBrowseProduct.asp?p=2
This site is from adobe. It has tons of premade actions, filters, brushes, etc. All free to download and easy to install. They have some really nice premade text actions.
http://www.1001freefonts.com/
Umm, not really a tutorial or anything, but everyone should have tons of fonts. Considering they're free you might as well pick up as many as you can. They come in handy when you're making graphics cause certain fonts just suit certain niches.
You don't need to make graphically intense pages, but as I said it's great to have that variety at hand. Also you should take the time to learn how to automate processes in photoshop as it will save you a ton of time.
Hope this helps
