Very New – please help

Please help. I am trying to work on a project for my club where I include interactive list where users can add their names and contact info. I would also like to be able to put the list into an events calendar format with a link to the list of names. I see several plug-ins that may be able to do this for me. Our club website is hosted on yahoo and as of now, I’m trying to play with designing this feature before making any changes to the actual site.

I am very new (as in today) to WP, and I am trying my best to understand, so please bear with me. I have downloaded WP and several plug ins. I have set up the config file the way it says to online (however i’m not entirely sure i’m doing this right).

I then thought I was overcomplicating things when on WP.com I could just register myself as a user and create from there. Well there is no place for plug ins here, so back to WP.org I went.

On WP.org, i can not find my “page” or admin bar or anything that on the left hand side that says “plug ins” for me to add and upload the ones I’ve downloaded. Am I missing something very basic here? I am racking my brain and getting no where. I’d really like to be able to do this myself if possible, so I can maintain it as events are added to the calendar.

So how to I get to my admin place for WP.org in order to upload and use the plug ins? Is it another process entirely? I just want a nice looking, easy to use interface to implement this idea.

Thanks in advance.
Laura