It is nothing short of maddening to look through all the different themes available through WordPress and try to decide which will best suit a photography website long term and have all the features a person will want. For one, all of them have features that are nearly identical, or absolutely identical. So, if the differences are nuanced, what can a person do to assure they have absolutely the right theme? They can be used in free versions. But those versions only allow a shallow test of the features, and the ones that tend to be nuanced, also tend to be the ones that cannot be tested till the theme is paid for.
Then there is the issue of payment. Sure, kick out a payment that will require renewal in a year, or there are those themes that are one-off payments. I’d much rather pay the one-off. So I look at the payment for the one-off and it turns out that there are components that are required, or there are other themes available from the provider that can come in bulk, or there is licensing to use on other websites as well as this one. Then the one-off $29 payment for a theme turns out to be upwards of $250!
What do I really need for the site? I know a couple of the original WordPress themes and they are pretty good without add-ons, and they do the minimums of what I need. So that is what I am using now. This theme is called Twenty Twenty-Three. It’s giving me a clean, neat layout and I like that just fine. I don’t think it is a good one for the magazine-like layouts that I think could do better for one of the other sites I maintain.
So, we are going with this one for new. Besides being neat and clean, it is free. And since I already have to pay for hosting, I don’t really want to pay for design services that I can get by without.