My website is jthomascrowne.com titled “The View From Here”. I am currently using the Twenty Seventeen Theme on a WordPress Business plan. I am relatively new to this. I know nothing about CSS. I tried and ditched Divi Builder. I have the following active plugins: Akismet-AntiSpam; Classic Editor; CoBlocks; Crowdsignal Forms and Polls and Ratings; Jetpack; Layout Grid; Page Optimizer; WordPress.com Editing Toolkit; WP Rocket Load CSS; Yoast SEO. I have read a multitude of pages of instruction about categories, pages, designs, themes on WordPress as well as numerous other blogs/instructions/CSS modifications to get where I want to be.

I renamed my site “The View From Here” from “Against the Wind” — a political blog with a front page, a blog feed, and posts with subscriptions and an email list of about 100 created by me. The new title is so I can include more topics than politics. What I have been trying to do is have a front page with a little information and a place to subscribe (I did that part), then I want to go to my political posts on a page/category titled “Against the Wind”. I want the page/category to have the same menu and the style of the front page but have different picture, title and a short intro followed by all my political posts. I want the same for my science posts/page/category, “Out of the Darkness”. Ditto for “Mirror, Mirror”, i.e., it’s own picture, etc. I want to be able to expand this list/pages/categories/menu items as I write about other things — each with it’s own unique page. When I post, I want those on the email list to receive the post from the page/category it appears on/in,not from the front page.

So far I have created a static front page with subscriptions allowed. I have created three additional pages and three additional categories as named above. I have populated them with pictures and text. I have created a menu that takes me to the other pages/categories (I have no idea whether they are pages or categories). When the menu takes me to “Against the Wind” it has its own picture under a squeezed picture of the title page (Can I eliminate the squeezed front page or make it smaller?). This is similar to other selected menu items.

At one point, I got my political posts to appear when I selected “Against the Wind” from the menu, but there was no heading, no picture, no squeezed image of the front page, only my posts. Now the menu takes me to the page/category with the picture, but none of my posts are there… or anywhere visible on my site.

Is there another theme that would work better for what I have in mind? Is it possible at all to get from where I am to where I want to be? If so, what do I need to do?