recommendations for blog + art hosting + v small ecommerce

[mrcharly-YHT]

I'm looking for recommendations for helping one of the brood set up their own website, with blog and the possibility of being able to sell some artwork.
When discussing what they were after, I showed them this site: http://www.robin-wood.co.uk/, which has a combination of blog, shop etc and that is the sort of facility they want to be able to have.

They had come across wix, but a superficial glance suggests that it costs if you need to use ecommerce functions.

[Kim]

Wix should be boycotted on the basis of the irritating Youtube adverts alone.

[Ham]

I'd be suspicious of any eCommerce platform that was foc. My webserver has scripts to install opensource eCommerce, but of course I pay for the server. Robin's site is Wordpress based, Wix looks pretty good (daughter is using it), can't help with how to customize, but apparently it is. (haven't seen any of their adverts)

ETA, Robin's uses Woocommerce https://woocommerce.com/ which apparently has a free "get started"

[Phil W]

If you go down the Wordpress route then WooCommerce is a good fit for the e-commerce bit. Out of the box WooCommerce has integration with PayPal or you can set it up for bank transfers or cash if you want to handle payment separately. Given the volumes of sales we are probably looking at then it'll work fine for what they want.  The costs will be the hosting costs as both WordPress and WooCommerce are open source and free.

[Valiant]

I can recommend Siteground quite highly and very reasonably priced too. Let me know if you decide to go for them as I might have a link that gives us both a lil off.

But I use their GoGeek package with one of my wordpress/woo sites which does around 1m page views a month and several others, and so far it's been brilliant. Granted I am pushing their limits but hey I keep asking them if I should upgrade to a VPS as I have the money set aside but they keep saying nah we're still coping.