So this iteration of the site is starting to take shape. The first time I used WordPress, I chose to host it on a service I selected for its price. On top of that, I bought a theme pack that did everything, including washing the dishes as far as I can tell. This combination brought the site to its knees very quickly and led to me trying Zenfolio for a year after I’d spent a lot of time trying to get the site to a state where it was reasonably responsive. Zenfolio was a significant improvement, easy to set up, maintain and update but expensive, as sales and commissions have been on the slow side, I decided to see what else might be on the market.
One of the things I used in my selection for hosting was to look at many recommendations from various photography sites. Oddly enough, I don’t remember them mentioning Amazon’s AWS or Google’s Compute platforms. Both of these have click-to-deploy WordPress setups which require filling in a few passwords and your hand is held pretty well.
This site is hosted on Google’s Compute platform at the moment. I’m using a simple theme with a couple of plugins to manage and display photographs and the performance seems pretty good. One of the things I like about WordPress is its modularity, so when I need to add sales or booking, it should be a relatively easy task.