ladycrow

You’ll need to open your style.css of the current theme
Look for the “body” selector and change color to the hex code you choose

Changing the header image is slightly harder without seeing the site

Are you saying you have a hosted blog on wordpress.com or that you’ve set up the blog on your domain?

You don’t need a plugin for this. You need to change the permalinks in yuor dashboard under Settings > Permalinks

You uploaded the whole wordpress folder?

Hmm. When writing a post, check the Comments and Pings field. Is “allow comments” checked?

If so, open up your index.php and add this

<?php comments_popup_link('Comment', '1 Comment', '% Comments'); ?>

before

<?php endwhile; ?>

Have you deleted the link from Manage > Links in your dashboard?

Does it? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this. Can you show an example?

To change colour but keep it uninterrupted, a span works best.
Put this in place of “Date”

<span class="redtext">Date</span>

Edit your CSS to add this

.redtext
{
color: red;
}

There are plugins that help give category access.
You might try this one: https://www.coppit.org/code/

I’m not sure what you mean by subpage. Your navigation links all seem to work, though.

Other bloggers scripts seem to do this with I-frames and WordPress just doesn’t work like that. If you set up your wordpress layout to match your site, then you can change all your sidebar/nav/etc links to go to the rest of your site

You can change the categories page to only show linked titles – would that work?

I cannot say exactly but I can tell you that you can create custom avatars for users without.

I found a few pesky unclosed tags and once I fixed those, the big issue and a few other issues shaped up.

I’m curious, though, what I need to change to make the user’s avatar link back to my homepage if the user has none.

I guess I fixed it. I created a new account and gave it adman capabilities. Then I logged in at that and was able to see that this new account could access it then WP was not treating the “admin” account as admin (even though it said it was). So with my new account, I granted this ability to my admin account and my problem seems solved.

But, this is really strange and I’m not quite sure why it happened in the first place.