installed correctly but stuck here:

Hey gang – My installation went correctly and used this 3rd party link which helped a lot:

https://www.lucidgreen.net/wordpressGuides/everymansWPinstall.pdf

I can login through my wp-admin, create posts/pages, and moved around in the control area, BUT, my pages are not displaying. I’ve removed my old index.htm page and when it loads index.php (the new one), it’s a plain white page.

https://www.jamesvandellen.com/index.php

I’ve read the info about authorizing the .htaccess file and the content and admin folders. Not sure exactly where to do this, I FTP through IE (ftp://jamesvandellen.com). Should I be using a 3rd party FTP to give these rights?

I’ve searched several posts/how tos on .htacess, and still a bit confused about how this relates to uploading pages and creating the initial site at index.php, and curious if anything current on my site is obstructing the process (all my htm files). would like to leave them in place until my wordpress pages are created, then switch to the index.php page as home page.

Thanks in advance for the help – my site is https://www.jamesvandellen.com (current index is index.htm). and apologies for the crappy look in firefox/opera, but that’s why I’m moving towards wordpress, seems like a logical layout, and looking forward to cleaning up the look. I understand the basics of HTML and CSS, and wordpress seems very intuitive.

all the best – james…