I've been asked to give some guidance on setting up a domain, mailbox, and website. My knee jerk reaction was to recommend Google Domains (pushing them away from GoDaddy) but I honestly don't know if that is the right solution. What I don't want is for this person to have to goto multiple places to set this up or manage it, or to have to get knee deep in DNS. So an affordable one-stop-shop would be preferred.

The website is for a portfolio of work projects. Each project would have a main photo with some text, and then a gallery of photos under that project each each photo may have some additional text.

The user is is tech-ish, but this needs to be simple enough on the back end so that it is not a drain. As I write and research, I'm wondering if a simple static is an option use a static site generator - if I am understanding things correctly.

Thoughts?

Honestly, if I have to do all that for a static site, it's already too much trouble for something so simple. I'd take a look at weebly.com. You can register a domain through them, have simple drag-n-drop website building (including e-commerce), and they'll even connect you up to gsuite for email, etc (for an extra cost, of course). Altogether, it's not as cheap as if you piecemeal everything together, but it's not an outrageous markup, either, and if all you want is something simple that gets out of your way, it does the job well.

I run my wife's theatre company off weebly, and the web stuff is predominantly done by a non-tech person. I cut-n-paste raw HTML for selling tickets, because their built-in e-commerce stuff didn't exist at the time we started using weebly, and isn't so much better than what we do now that it's worth switching over. We don't care so much about customizing the our footer, so we just use the free plan. Works totally fine.

Thanks canuckInOR, I'll look into that for them.