I'm helping a friend set up a website to represent her brick and mortar custom painted furniture studio/shop. The goal is to set up a basic, static site now, but be able to expand on it in the future to include ecommerce.

Right now she needs to be able to present samples of their work, announce sales, announce craft shows they're participating in, feature new designs, and the like. We will be using a lot of graphics (we can do clickable thumbnails for the images).

Because she has no experience in web design or maintenance, no budget to buy an editor, and wants to be able to update the home page and graphics easily herself, I'm thinking WordPress is a good option.

Can it handle a graphic heavy site? Will it easily grow into include a shopping cart later on? Would you recommend something else?

Thanks in advance.