Can I make a template for my students?

  • Unknown's avatar
    jjshields56 · Member ·

    Greetings,

    I’m a professor (Carthage College USA) and would like all my students to create a online portfolio of their work to aid them in their job searches. I current have the students do this in Notion software (free version), but I think creating their portfolio in WordPress.com would be more beneficial (since they are all business/marketing majors).

    A few years ago I had them create their portfolios in Notion WITHOUT giving them a template and many/most of the portfolios looked really bad. Based on this experience, I now give them a Notion template to customize and now they all look very professional. (FYI, here is the template I give them: https://www.notion.so/jjshieldsportfolio/JJ-Shields-e47271ba7ba44e778aa52cd0f0971704 )

    So, would it be possible for me to create a template in WordPress.com and then have all my students customize it. (Note: because they are college students, they will be using the free version of WordPress.com)

    Thanks for your help!!!

    Cheers,

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    It is not possible to upload custom themes on WordPress.com for free accounts. This is an option with our WordPress.com Business Plan (and higher) but this would require all your students to upgrade, which it sounds like you would like to avoid.

    However, you would be able to recreate much of the flavor of your example Notion site using the layout tools in our “block editor” which will allow you to create similar page layouts to what you have there, including columns, various image and text blocks, etc. Kinda like Legos, but for website layout.

    You can learn more about how to use the block editor here: https://wordpress.com/theme/hever

    As a starting point, I would recommend this theme: https://wordpress.com/theme/hever

    The layout you see in the demo site is created with text/image blocks, and is very customizable. Also you can have more than one site on your account, so I would recommend creating a “starter site” that has all the pages and layouts you want your students to begin with. Then you could create an export file of this site, and give it to each of your students to import into their new site.

    As long as they are using the same theme as you specify, and import the starter pages using the export file you provide, they would essentially have a copy of your starter site to begin working from. More info about how to export here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/export/

    Hope this helps!

  • Unknown's avatar
    jjshields56 · Member ·

    Thanks for the help.

    I will explore the explore route.

    Cheers,

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