Please recommend/advise on setting up website...

[martinalex]

An artist friend is looking to set up a website to showcase his work.
Neither of us know how to do this and despite endless googling we're still confused.

Ideally, the website would be free to set up and run but we're not sure what this means in terms of 'domain names' and so on.
This is the kind of thing we have in mind: http://www.fayballard.com/index.html

Could you recommend a way to achieve this from scratch?
He has the images from a digital camera and has written a CV.
Basically it's just a showcase for the paintings with an email address for people to contact him.
Would there be a way of measuring how many hits the website and individual images achieve?

Can this be done by novices? Can it be done free or very low cost? Or would you recommend a website company? And if so, who would you recommend?

[zaphod42]

One of the easiest ways forward would be to contact the local college/uni that offer Web Design/IT courses.

Plenty of people looking for a real project for their portfolio / CV - and will know the tricks already - and would do it as part of their project work or for beer money.

[ajame5]

For portfolio sites you can try cargo collective. It's solely for creative portfolios, I used it a couple of years ago, its worth google-ing. You get a cargocollective.com/yourname address but you can buy a domain name and point to your page. .co.uk's tend to be less than £10 a year.

[martinalex]

Thanks all. What my friend would really like to do (I think) is get exactly the same website as the one I linked above. He's not into being hosted on more general art sites or using the Etsy type of site.
I'm just trying to find out if we can buy the site 'off the shelf' and set it up as "tommyartist.com" type of thing.
It doesn't need to be able to process payments or anything like that as nothing will be purchased online.
The only thing that will ever change once it's set up is adding photos of new paintings - one a month or so.