CT-Scott

Thanks for all of the replies so far. I'll take a closer look at several of these recommendations and post back. We haven't made a decision yet, so if anyone else wants to chime in, please do.

Hello all, I'm a software developer by day, but have long been a creative hobbyist. Many years ago, I created websites (and even developed my own content management system), but when my wife wanted to set up a blog over a year ago, we did a bit of research, and it seemed like the simplest and most cost-effective way to get going as quickly as possible, while still having our domain hosted ourselves and having our own domain name, was to use bluehost as a hosting provider combined with WordPress as the back-end CMS. There were a ton of templates available that my wife could choose from and then customize. Flash forward to today and my daughter (Senior in college getting a BA in Art) wants to set up a website to showcase her portfolio. Now it is with much sadness that I must tell you that my daughter has been anti-technology for some time. Her artwork uses traditional mediums (her primary focus is printmaking). She's extremely talented, but has also been pretty stubborn about wanting to do much in the way of graphic design. Recently though, I was finally able to get her to use one of my iPads (with Apple Pencil) to dabble with Affinity Designer (and also Procreate), so I'm still holding out hope that it will "click" with her and she'll start to love it (or, worst case, she finds it hard to find a job after graduating, and then softens up to the idea of delving more into graphic design). But I mention this mainly to point out that my daughter isn't currently equipped to create her own website from the ground-up, so I've been thinking that something like bluehost w/WordPress will be the best way to go for her, too. Plus, since my wife has some experience now with the back-end WordPress CMS functionality, she'll be able to help get her up-to-speed on that. Now, because my daughter is an artist, and the website is meant to showcase her work, I want to use a template that doesn't have too much of its own graphical elements (a few that she could replace with her own, would be fine), because I don't want to give the impression to anyone that she designed the website itself. Personally, I'm thinking something very clean/white, where her uploaded artwork will be the primary focus. So a couple of questions: 1) First off, if anyone thinks that going the bluehost / WordPress route is a bad idea and that you have a much better recommendation for this scenario, please offer up your recommendations. Again, I'd prefer something that has a minimal learning curve, because she gets quickly impatient when working with technology. 2) Assuming the bluehost / WordPress approach makes sense, can you recommend some templates out there that would meet my requirements of being pretty simple such that it makes the uploaded photos of her artwork the main focus? I'm open to paying for the template, rather than a free template, if there are particular paid ones that you think are really worth spending extra for. Thanks in advance!

Thanks RC-R. So I just went through and experimented a bit, and I *think* I understand it better now. While you're probably right that the convoluted aspect of all of this is mostly Apple's fault, it does seem like Affinity could tweak some on-screen descriptions here and there to make it a little clearer. FWIW, the Files app wouldn't let me move/copy anything into the Affinity Designer folder on my iCloud drive. I manually created a new folder (on my MacBook) and I was able to move/copy the files that way.

Thanks for the helpful reply MEB. OK, so I went ahead and purchased the "desktop" version of Affinity Designer also (via the iTunes/App store). I see that it set up a link to my iCloud drive (which I just recently turned on yesterday and which caused me a good deal of confusion/angst). On my iPad, the first few projects I created with Designer I had saving locally. I just switched the default settings on the iPad to save to iCloud. But if I go into one of my existing projects and duplicate it or save it again, it's not pushing it to iCloud. Only brand new projects are getting pushed to my iCloud folder. How do I get my existing projects to start saving to my iCloud drive? Another experiment: I saved a new project, which saved it as "Untitled" to iCloud. I then renamed it on my iPad, but the name change didn't carry over to the iCloud drive on my laptop. I then pushed a Save on the iPad and I saw a cloud symbol appear briefly next to the file in Finder on my laptop (indicating that it was syncing something), but it still didn't rename the file. That feels like a bug to me.

Thanks for the replies so far. For anyone else that may care, I was able to get my old Paint Shop Pro for Windows (v7, I think) up and running and did a little experimentation. It had an option to export to PSD, but didn't maintain the vector layers. There was no option for exporting to AI, and I didn't have much success with the other formats that it supported. I did some more Googling and found an app (Windows only, I think) called reaConverter which supports converting PSP files to other formats. I didn't have any luck converting to AI (if I remember, it pretty much converted it to a raster image), but I did have some luck using that app to convert it to an SVG file. It did some funky things in the process, though, like converting a lot of rectangle images to other shapes. For the most part, though, it seemed to do a decent job. It looks like reaConverter costs $50, and since I don't have too many files I need to convert, I may look around for other options. Getting back to the desktop vector app...I'd be interested in hearing some opinions regarding Affinity Designer vs Sketch vs Adobe Illustrator (and any others worth mentioning). It seems like using Affinity Designer for the desktop, aside from being less expensive, *should* make moving workflows between the iPad and desktop easier, but if that's not true, let me know. Adobe Illustrator, being the industry standard, would be nice to have experience with, but it's hard to justify the cost (certainly right now while I'm mostly using these apps for fun).

Hello everyone. After using and loving vector design using Paint Shop Pro for Windows many years ago, I bought an iPad Pro 9.7 (with Pencil) about a year or so ago and wanted to get back into doing some vector design. The other day I bought Affinity Designer for iPad and have been going through a tutorial I bought on Udemy, and have been having fun with it. Because the price is so much more affordable than Adobe Illustrator (and less expensive than Sketch, too), I've thought about buying the "desktop" version as well for my MacBook Pro. Do I even need to, or might I be happy enough just sticking with the iPad version? I'm thinking that it could be easier/quicker to point and click on node points with a mouse and my MacBook, but I'd be curious to hear what others think. I've read that the UI between the iPad and desktop versions is quite a bit different, but I'm assuming (?) that it would still be a lot easier to move between the two apps compared to, say, buying Sketch for my MacBook. Or should I consider buying Sketch instead? On a separate note, does anyone with past Paint Shop Pro experience have any recommendations for how I can get my layered vector PSP files moved over to Affinity Designer?