Sidebar Questions with Links

Hi there,
I am running WordPress 2.2 on a fairly new installation. I am attempting to modify the sidebar of my theme.

The website in question is: mymurdermystery.com

I’m trying to setup a navigation to specific pages (see the Navigation list) on the right hand side. Whenever I try to add an a href tag on the items, the name of the page I want to link to disappears and becomes ‘Recently Written’ and goes to a bad link. I thought possibly that I am not allowed to do direct a href links to specific pages within my blog but the various support pages I’ve found seem to indicate that I can do this.

I’ve surfed through a bunch of support threads as well as this codex page which was helpful. Instead of doing a direct a href link, I tried doing the list_pages instead.

The wp_list_pages with the include= *seemed* to work good but it only lists the first page id that I would put in the line. If you see, that is under the ‘Navigation’ section and is listed ‘Pages’. Only one page shows up but I put 4 different IDs in there to test it. Is there any reason why all four pages are not showing up?

Also, I want to remove several of the sections (recently written, tags, etc) but anytime I attempt to remove each ‘li’ section by itself, it gives me this error
“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_ENDWHILE” – Do I have to edit something specific in the css file?

Thanks for any advice you can give.