After all searches and efforts, I later discovered that the problem was from the spelling in the settings.py file.

STATICFILEDIRS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static/')] //Wrong

which is meant to be

STATICFILES_DIRS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')] //Right

Thank you to anybody that tried to help resolve this. I hope this will save someone else the trouble and time I spent to discover this