Thanks

CreateSpace, Kindle Direct, & IngramSpark are Print On Demand companies where you can self-publish e-books or print books.

CreateSpace requires a PDF file for print books, so you could write in Word & then convert to PDF. If you have a lot of images & tricky formatting, Word works, but make sure you use Styles for consistency & smaller file size. I don't know if Word can convert to high quality PDF file because I have the Adobe Suite & Word works with Acrobat to convert to a high quality PDF file.

Another option is Adobe's InDesign. It converts to high quality PDF for print. You can purchase a monthly subscription & it probably has a free trial offer, too. There are a lot of video tutorials out there to teach you how to use it.

Scrivener is a popular author software package & if you are writing in it, it also converts to PDF, although I'm not sure it has high quality options, which you'd want with images.

E-books come in an assortment of file formats. Calibre is the software I used to convert my Word doc to an e-book format. Calibre can convert to most of the popular e-book formats. The e-book was trickier. Some of the formats looked much better than others and all of them needed tinkering to make them look as good as my original file.

Are you going to print in color? Is your goal to make money or to share helpful info? Knowing what you want to do will determine some of your choices.


InDesign

Calibre

I don't think this will be a commercial venture.

We are leaning towards a creating a blog with the capability to convert it into a hardcopy book for the coffee table.

The e-book idea may be too much.

It was my first time using that software, so it could have been a user issue. An e-book travel guide is a great idea.

Do you have your domain name & hosting figured out? Are these the kind of steps you're asking about? Where to start with blogging?

Yes

A domain name would be something like shred.com or travelUSA.net They will tell you if the name is already taken when you go to register it. Network Connections, Blue Host, Host Gator, GoDaddy are all hosting companies that also register domain names.

Next you need a place to host your website. If you're just blogging, wordpress.COM might be all you need. WordPress is all set up & they host it for you. I don't know how much they charge & I don't know if they register domain names.

If you don't want to use WordPress or if you want to use a theme or widget that wordpress.COM doesn't have, then you'll have to go with wordpress.ORG. Then you have to choose a hosting company, like one of the ones listed above. You can still use WordPress with the hosting companies, & in fact most of them have one-click installation, AND you aren't limited to what theme/widgets you use. Just be aware that that can add to security issues.

The difference between wordpress.com & wordpress.org

A lot of hosting companies also have DIY site builders, & there are places like WIX, that claim to be DIY site builders, but if you aren't HTML/CSS savvy, they can end up looking really hokey.

WordPress may not be the best.

On my website I have WordPress for a blog (which is not updated regularly). But I found posting photos with WordPress annoying. It is possible, especially with some of the plug-ins, to do it but when Wordpress updates often the plug-ins are not also updated as quickly. I lost my original (not very responsive) plug-in for posting photos in an update. For posting mass numbers of photos - I have been putting over a hundred years of family albums online - WordPress was just too clunky.

For most of my photo posting I use jAlbum. It is much easier to create and add albums and photos. Different skins (themes) will allow different information to be added to each photo in various styles. I can prepare the photos, point jAlbum to the folder and it will make albums and sub-albums that mirror the folders on my computer. At different points in its evolution jAlbum has automatically picked up captions from the JPEGs but the skin I am most fond of does not do that automatically. In a way that is better since I have to check each photo and can add as much information to the captions for each as I like.

My web site host, Lunarpages, has WordPress as one of the applications that they support. They automatically update it as needed and I just have to update the plug-ins. jAlbum does not need that kind of support except for their widgets (add on that allow shopping carts, etc.). Mostly jAlbum creates the web pages for you with the scripts to set up tables, slide shows, comments, captions and such. Once you create the basic pages (all I have used) they don't change or need updating until you want to do that.

https://jalbum.net/en/

Use Kindle direct. I think is the best.