How To Go About My Website Idea

Hello WordPress Users,

Firstly, I’d like to apologize if this is not the proper place to post this thread. I read through the welcoming message and the master list of 4.0 compatibility issues, and I did not see my question addressed. (This is likely because my question is rather broad, and I’m looking for advice more than anything else.) I also looked through each board and was not sure which one was the most appropriate for this kind of thread. “How-To” seemed general enough, so I hope this is right.

Anyway, I have a website up and running on WordPress 4.0. There were no installation issues and there are no current issues that I’m aware of. I am a complete and utter newbie to this sort of thing, though, and I’m wondering if someone could point me in the right direction in regards to how to go about my website. My intent is to make a site that focuses on award-based video game reviews, and what I mean by that is that score or ranks are completely out of the picture. Rather than earning a score (say 7/10), each game would be eligible to earn a number of merit badges, so to speak, that highlight their strengths. For instance, if a game has phenomenal replay value, it might receive the “Undying” badge in a review.

I would like to know what tools/plugins/widgets (I don’t necessarily understand the difference between those, so if someone could also explain, that’d be great) I should use to go about this. I would like to be able to post reviews as their own type of content that allows me to easily click and assign my uploaded badges to them. Is this sort of tool something that I would have to create myself, or is there something already out there that will suit my needs? Otherwise, I intend to keep my site very simplistic, serving as a blog/journal for these reviews to be posted, and maybe having forums to get a community started.

If someone could also address a minor issue: It seems that I need to reset my password a LOT. I use the same password reset each time, and after it gets reset, I change the password to what I want, and it works for a while. A day or two later, however, when I try to log back in using those same login details, WordPress won’t log me in to my dashboard, and I gotta repeat the process. Is this usual? Thank you to whatever help you guys can give me. If needed I will provide my website URL and other information, as long as it is not discouraged in the welcome message. For now, I suppose I could mention that my web host is HostGator.