Design: Layout / Theme of Website

[nelsonic]

At present our website is pretty generic/boring ... see snapshot in comment below ⬇️

Criteria

• [ ] Ultra-clean and fast on Mobile [where most of our readers will be]
• [ ] No unnecessary mentions of the theme creator or wordpress.com
• [ ] SEO & PageSpeed should score should be taken before and after installing/updating the theme [see below]

Potential source of a free theme: https://colorlib.com/wp/free-wordpress-education-themes/

[nelsonic]

Snapshot of website using the basic theme we selected when creating the site: https://bragamontessori.com/

Firefox full-viewport screenshot:

Mobile View:

What's up with the links to Instagram and TikTok on the About us page? 🔗 🤷‍♂️ --> 🙅

[nelsonic]

Current performance is quite low: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbragamontessori.com 🐌

SEO is "OK". 👌

[Stephanymtr]

@nelsonic I chose the current website's theme out of the couple of free options that WordPress offers. https://wordpress.com/themes/free/bragamontessori.com

I have be through almost all of them and picked the current theme that we have (as shared above).

I'm unable to use any other layouts/theme options outside of the website because downloading/installing other themes is only possible a in premium account. I downloaded one of them and tried to install it, but does not work with the free account:

I know it deserves some more love, but I tied up the website by removing those (installed automatically, not by me) social media links and other useless information.

[nelsonic]

We don't have a "free" account with Wordpress.com by any means. We paid €8/month = €96/year for the "Premium" account to have the custom domain. Wordpress.com forcing us to upgrade to their "Business Plan" (€40/month) just to change the theme is a deal-breaker IMO. 🤦‍♂️

[Stephanymtr]

oh, that's really sad and expensive 😢

[nelsonic]

It's not just that they want €40/month (€480/year) the way I think about anything tech is with a "5 year Plan" and if you extrapolate €2,500 is the least we would pay for this if we upgrade to their "Business Plan" because then there are many other add-ons/up-sells they will want to charge us for like the "Advanced SEO" plugin, user-management and spam filtering. Everything is extra even though many of these plugins used to be free!!

Anyway, we'll have an alternative soon enough. 🤞 For now we can still do research on themes/layout and capture it here in this issue. 🙏