Problem with new pages…

I do not know any website code, but have worked with wordpress.com blogs for several years. I thought an upgrade wouldn’t be too hard, but I am a bit overwhelmed. Here are my questions…

I downloaded the child theme and activated that to work on developing the website. I read the documentation, the wordpress articles, but I am still lost. Do I have the child theme activated, and make all the changes there? I am not changing any CSS, as I do not know that, but simply colors, page templates, and creating pages for the website. This is what I tried, but every “new page” that I created, does not appear.

I thought maybe b/c I was in the construction site mode, it was affecting it, but I took that off and same problem. I tried deleting the child theme and going to the main theme, and found that was changed as the child theme was… pages still would not load. I double checked, simply tried to view the page, not use menu links, but still didn’t work.

It seems too the pages I tried to delete, but took out of the trash, some of them do not show up as well. I added the Event Calendar plugin and it appears to be working, but the pages will not load that are connected with that.

I am okay starting over if that is needed, I simply don’t know why new pages will not show up. Do I need to put them on the regular highend one (not the child theme), first, then edit on the child theme?

Again, I read all I could on the child themes, but the simple tasks for those of us without CSS… it isn’t enough… and I fear I really messed it all up! Please help me figure out where to fix things, and perhaps an order of operations for working between the parent and child themes. I don’t even know which should be activated… and I don’t get how an update can be done on the parent theme and be effective on the child theme, without knowing what got changed… I imagine you have to manually update the child theme? It is confusing to me. Lots of questions… basically I just want to have my site working and create pages that work for us.

And lastly, can I delete the demo content pages? I won’t be using them and it is just clutter for my eyes. I will be building a simple church website. We wanted some bells and whistles for special events, that we don’t get with our current website. I think the video helps and documentation pages will suit the needs of our church for what we will do on the website.

Thanks for helping this green website developer!
Melissa