I know what I want to do but not how to do it!

I'm in the process of changing the website for my workplace which is an art gallery. At the moment we are using gallery three, which works for what we want to do which is display quite a lot of images, but what we ideally want is something which would look a bit 'cleaner' and is more customisable.

I've sketched out what I want- basically I want it to be like most ecommerce sites you see, with the artists page showing thumbnails of all their paintings, and then each painting it's own page with a larger imager and details about the painting. So essentially it is like ecommerce but without the option to add items to basket and buy them if that makes sense.

Any suggestions of how this could be done would be great! Thanks

 

Sounds like a WordPress installation with a Portfolio styled theme or plugin would be sufficient. It can be done quickly and for fairly cheap. I don't know if these are any good and I'm sure there are plenty to choose from, but a couple of examples:

Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/awesome-filterable-portfolio/
A list of several themes: http://www.wpinquire.com/the-seven-best-wordpress-portfolio-themes-of-2014/

 

I've thought about wordpress and I'm not keen, I'll use it if theres no other way, but I'm not wild about using a template that I can't change. We have very specific fonts we want to use etc and a very specific layout in mind of the header etc. Thank you anyway though!

 

For any artistic portfolios or galleries, I'd recommend using Squarespace. They offer a wide variety of well-designed templates to choose from and plenty easy-to-use options to customize your site. As KillaKeith said, Wordpress is probably the cheapest option, but if you don't want to complicate yourself, love good design, and don't mind spending a few $$ a month, choose Squarespace.

If you want to go wild and develop a custom website from scratch, there are many jQuery plugins you might want to take a look into, just like: http://miromannino.github.io/Justified-Gallery/ They look extremely cool on artistic galleries.

Hope it helps,
kete

 

Not sure why you think you can't customise a WordPress install as you see fit?