Im working on my page too and as you I want to put a similar message in the forum. First recommendation: www.amarante.com... well:

Request Price for amarante.com
We will only respond to serious requests that are complete and accurate. Any submissions with false or unverifiable information will be deleted.
The quoted price will be at least $688 and may be over $10,000. Due to high demand and decreasing availability, the prices of Premium Domains are rising weekly.

Maybe the price is excessive, but www.mdamarante.com cost not more than 10$ and its available but I dont like this domain.

www.amarante.us cost 7$ and its available, also is available www. MichelleAmarante.com (19$), the most appropriate IMHO.

About the colors, you dont like dark background and I use dark in my page because I think that for color photos is better, but one of your chapters is Casual Portraits Of Children & Families and for this the soft background is excellent.

DreamWeaver is the better software for this, and the new version the MX 2004 is very confortable work with it and you can get the most professional look.

My last recommendation, buy one book about DreamWeaver and use style sheet and templates, with this you can change the look or repetitive information of your whole website in just one minute.

Of course feel free to send an IM if you need some help with Dreamweaver or flash also if you want free templates or style sheets.

About flash Im working in the slideshows, you can see a test here: slideshow (its not finished, its just a test) but its an example of flash, the bad is that it needs to write the scripts but can be interesting for you too.