Which free theme is recommended given these site demands?

I am about to launch my first website with www.ads-software.com, the one thing left to do is choosing a theme. I have an idea of how my website should look like, and I would like to get suggestions for a theme to use that (comes close to or) matches these needs. If you have a theme to recommend, please give me the link to a website built with that theme so that I can see how a site built with that theme looks like. Please recommend only free themes for now, at the moment I wish to start off with a free theme.

Requirements for my website:
1) a header with website title in big, below in smaller characters a subtitle, and possibly a picture although the picture is not strictly necessary

2) header menu with 1 or 2 levels of submenu’s

3) photo gallery or caroussel possible on static pages

4) footer with a portion of text and, if possible, social media icons linking to my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc

5) the menu should allow for having only certain pages included in the menu, while other pages are “hidden” but linked to at some place in the website

6) being able to see when was the last time that a certain static page was edited/saved

7) a theme without specific particuliarities, so that if I would like to change to a different theme in the more distant future, none of my posts and pages (including text and photos) and menu’s would be lost or displayed incorrectly. In other words, changing to another theme later should be easy.

Those were the necessarities, a few other things that are option (so bonus if a certain theme allows it on top of the “must haves”):

1) 3 to 6 photos on the frontpage with some small text below, where clicking on the photo leads to a certain page from the main menu

2) possibility to choose between 1 or 2 columns (so that it becomes possible to have a page with a photo on the left and text to the right of it, or vice versa)

3) post-per-email function for the blog, as WordPress.com has it

These are not necessary, but bonus points for a theme that allows it.

I have taken a WordPress course, and there we worked with themes such as Twenty-Fourteen, Accelerate, Twenty-Seventeen, … although our teacher advises against Twenty-Fourteen as it’s quite old.

Thanks for recommendations!

• This topic was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Jan Dembowski.