General Problem

I have a web site which friend was creating for me as a favour. 80% done, but he can no longer do it, so I have to finish it. I can write little bits of html. Very much a begginer. i have in the past set up a couple of WordPress blogs. Easy enough. But coming to deal with a site the whole system becomes a joke. The whole idea of calling is easy seems a false claim. Sorry to be so aggressive, but I have spent ages finding apparent flaws in the system – unless I am doing something completly wrong.

Issue 1: When I try to write html code using the html tab it impossible to add any layout convention that makes html easy to read. Even leaving comments in the page does not work. It makes it very tedious to look at and find the bit you want to edit. No line numbering either.

Issue 2 Html code disappears. I tried writing the html in another system then transferring it to the html tag. This does not work because half the code I wrote got stripped out.

Issue 3 Ok so I tried putting up with the mess of a layout and write to html code directly into the tab. I press Update and the code is stripped out.

Issue 4 The latter is not consistent because I have created tables and successfully but not other things. So is there a limited number of html commands that WordPress understands?

Issue 5 But this disappearing code seems to apply to some advertised features of WordPress – namely the More tag! worked on some of my previous blogs, but not here. The tag code <!–more–> seems simple enough but it does not appear.

Issue 6 So just restrict what you are doing to the visual editor tab. Unfortunately that provides restricted features. For example I cannot add a table. The More tag does not work.

Issue 7 You are not allowed to swtich between Visual and html tabs. Unbelievable.

I have ploughed through the forums and found others having these problems, but the solutions go beyond my skill level at the moment. I have spent hours trying to resolve this and seem to have gone nowhere. Of course when you are new to html it is not clear whether it is your ignorance or somethig stupid in the system. Am I missing something simple? Help!!!