First, context: I am not developing a theme, I am not mucking around with PHP. All I wanted to do was throw up a quick temporary WordPress site in a few minutes, paste my content in, and call it "good enough" for a month until I could sit down and dedicate real time to building a website.
I really liked the look of the free Zerif Lite theme, so I grabbed that. Ever since I have had nothing but trouble.
I created two pages: Front Page and Blog. I intended for Front Page to look like the Zerif Lite front page and for Blog to be... a blog. Simple enough, really. I created a single menu which linked to each page. I then set up my settings like so:
However my front page was just an empty blog. There was a default side bar on the right and nothing on the left. It looked atrocious.
I went into Front Page and added some content:
Which didn't show up correctly when I checked out the site:
I've been all over the internet for two hours now and my patience is wearing thin. No one seems to have any answers. The only answers I've found are that a plugin could be causing it (not possible, see my plugin list below) or reinstalling WordPress should fix it (tried this, didn't work)
Looking for any WordPress pros who can help me figure out what on Earth I'm doing wrong
Plugin list:
Update
I've tried changing the theme but it still doesn't seem to be treating my front page like anything other than a blog post: