The Slideshow Pro module for Lightroom excels at letting you build a Flash gallery for your site without owning the Flash authoring program. (And, obviously, without having to know Flash.)
Once you have the slideshow set up the way you want, you don't really have to visit the web module again. Instead, you can do all your work in the Lightroom Library module, and you can use Slideshow Pro DIRECTOR to manage the images on your web site. (I know, the price just doubled, but Director is really what makes this whole system shine. It is robust, stable, and a cinch to work with once you get it all set up.)
The workflow would look something like this:
Initial setup:
1. Build your slideshow exactly how you want it in Lightroom (using a single image only)
2. Export to get the Flash files and some other supporting files.
3. Embed the Flash on your website OR just upload the whole thing (because it can make a turnkey website for you)
4. Go into SSP Director and adjust the settings for later automation when you upload images.
Your site is now ready to receive images.
Managing your site:
1. Collect your images into collections in Lightroom.
2. Put all your metadata in place in Lightroom, for example, Titles and Captions.
3. Export the images in the size/resolution you wish.
4. Use Director to upload to your site.
You can fit as much text in a Slideshow Pro slideshow as you can fit in your metadata, with various options on how it will appear. Check out my site in the signature below for two examples of text. While I don't use very much, I am going to change the second line to hold a sentence or two.
On the home page, you are looking at a SSP show, but there are no controls showing. You can see the text permanently displayed below. SSP takes this automatically directly from the image metadata. IN this case, I can just open Director every week or so, and drag the front image to the back of the line to change what appears on my site. Or, I could just upload a new image and have it auotmatically replace the front page image (by having the Slideshow ordered by most recent first).
In the Gallery section, the controls are visible, and the text pops up when you hover over the image. There are several different options for how the text appears. You can also completely control the size and colour of the text, as well as positioning and how and when it appears.
With Director, you can turn images off and on, add images, delete them, and change the sort order. Manual sorting allows you to just drag thumbnails around the screen. All this works in an Ajax-powered interface that includes FTP upload.
In the example in my sig line, I have embedded the SSP slideshow within a site, but as I said, you can have SSP for Lightroom export an entire site, ready for upload and ready for you to manage your gallery with Director.