All depends on what you want. Mining/skinning will generate money and you can pay someone else to craft whatever you need - in fact, most of the way up you can just provide materials and someone will make them for next to nothing to level their own smithing skills. I've got blacksmithing though, because I thought it was kind of cool to make my own armor as I went up. Blacksmithing will eat up your money - not only will you be selling most of the stuff you make leveling up to vendors because no one wants it, but you will also be eating up all the materials you collect trying to level up and won't get the money for them either. With iron going for better than 1G and stack and mithril around 5G at the AH, I don't even like to think of the lost profits I had from making tons of bracers and selling them to a vendor or giving them to a friend to disenchant so he could level his enchanting skill.
If I were doing it again, I'd just mine and skin until I got level 60 and could really use the high level crafted stuff, then drop skinning for smithing and power level that. The quests for the training would be trivial and it would be much easier to collect all the materials I needed to level. Of course, then I wouldn't have had "Made by <myself>" written on half my armor pieces all the way up!
Edited, Wed Mar 15 09:35:44 2006 by fledarmus