Welcome to WordPress! It sounds like a perfect fit for the project you are describing.
To start out with your best foot forward, I would recommend having a look through a variety of themes that support both ecommerce (with WooCommerce) and also provide portfolio functionality:
https://wordpress.org/themes/tags/e-commerce+portfolio/
WooCommerce is an ideal option for selling merchandise on your site, and as your site grows, and as you need to add specific features or functionality to the ecommerce part of your site, there are many plugins and extensions that you can add that will help you extend functionality as needed. Of course, just like WordPress itself, it can scale and serve as the foundation for just about anything you might need to do in the way of selling online.
I think portfolio functionality will best support the functionality you’re looking for in displaying profiles and short bios of vaudeville performers.
Portfolios can be handled in a pretty wide variety of ways, but I’d say the most popular options are with the Jetpack plugin, which allows you to enable portfolio functionality (turn this on and it creates a “Portfolio” custom post type on your site) or with a theme that provides a similar “Portfolio” post type.
After you have the ability to add “Portfolio” items to the site, I would start adding performer content to the site, and see what custom CSS or customization the portfolio page template might need, if anything at all, to display the information perfectly.
Thank you, I had been looking at some of these themes earlier but had started working with Hoot Du, which is not in this search but in looking at specs it does work “out of the box with Jetpack”. So, will give that a shot. So far not seeing anything on importing these 200 profiles. They are on the website and in a Publisher file and will be murder to pull indvidually.
I’ve got two “Dummies” ebooks but wonder if you have any recommendations for online tutorials. At this stage of my befuddlement, I don’t mind paying if it’s good. Estimate for rebuild of our site was six grand. That, is way out of the question.
But again, thank you for the info and quick response.
We’ve found that on our eCommerce fulfilment that the fantastic Enfold theme by Kriesi has been really straightforward in getting set up and maintained. They come with a variety of “demos” included, so that you can load up some dummy information and designs to better get to grips with the system. They also have a really great community and forum that help out with any issues you may come across.
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