Web site design for photography is a bit sticky. I have come around to the notion that the web isn't a particularly good place for the kind of photography I am interested in.
The biggest choice in play is whether or not to do thumbnails. In general, whichever way you go, there's some sort of "flip through them in a linear sequence" thing involved as well.
Thumbnails are well suited to the "one-by-one" vision of photography, the idea that every photograph stands more or less on its own. The thumbnails let you pick out the ones that catch your eye, and click in to the gallery there. This model essentially demands graphically strong pictures, since that's all you can see in the thumbnail. Vast swathes of material just vanish in this model (a lot of the delicate platinum printed material from the early 20th century, photos that are based on masses of detail, that kind of thing).
This one-by-one graphically strong school of photography is and has been dominant for the last 100 years or thereabouts, so it works ok.
Personally, I'm not very interested in these pictures, but that is my taste.
The other approach eschews the thumbnails, and it is here that the side-scrolling pictures-on-white approach dominates. The conceit is that it's like a book, but all too often the artist emulates the worst kind of book, the mid-20th century portfolio style, with Serious Pictures centered one per page, on white, usually recto with either nothing verso of a small blob of text. "American Photographs" and "The Americans" follow roughly this style, but there are 1000s of others. I consider these things to be essentially sarcophagi for photographs. Sometimes they work, more often they simply bore the reader to death within a few pages. These things languish on the shelf, to be dragged out and flipped through at random for a few minutes every year, decade, or never, depending on how Weighty The Title.
The idea is that the pictures shall be viewed in sequence, starting from This One, and proceeding through These In Order and ending with That One. Web sites with the side-scrollers are generally mercifully short, Sommerfeld's 8155 seems to have 26 photos, so it is not too much agony to wade through.
In general you will find that these things are sequenced, but the sequence is generally dunderheaded, barely enough to sustain interest for 26 photos, if that.
I happen to like this usage of the side-scroller:
http://www.katrinkoenning.com/work/Indefinitely.htmlWhile it's still the same tedious stupid-navigation-on-white you will notice that the pictures are of various sizes and placements. While there are simple graphical connections to be made from this picture to that, there are also multiple themes woven in. The connections are not all "this picture, and then the one that follows it"
While you will see the same art-school tropes as Sommerfeld uses ("look, here's a picture of someone's arm for no discernible reason at all") it's vastly more visually interesting. The connections between frames are not merely "here is this form, and in the next picture, look, there it is again only made of of french fries." Both graphical forms and subject matter appear repeatedly.
Koenning's project has vastly more depth than Sommerfeld's, it gives you far more places to interpet and to wonder. And it's a hell of a lot prettier, too.