Pages and posts not showing

I redesigned my site locally over the past couple of weeks using WordPress and Xampp and I was finally ready to upload it today but I’m having all sorts of problems left and right. The big one right now is that I can see all of my pages and post in the Dashboard, but none of them are visible on the site. For example if I edit one and click the View Page button, I just get a Page Not Found error. I’m not really much of an expert at WordPress or even modern HTML. Any thoughts?

https://www.philnolan3d.com

I tried setting my Permalinks back to default and that seems to work but the guy who created the theme I use seemed very insistent that it had to be a custom permalink saying /%postname%/ If I try to do that WordPress tells me “If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file.”

Edit: OK I set the .htaccess file to 777 just while I was saving the permalinks, then changed it back. and I see some improvement. Odd thouggh, I never had to mess with all these permissions before.