Dashboard Lost

I am new to WordPress, and spent considerably longer than five minutes installing it to the root directory of my server. Still, every setback taught me just a little.

But now I am stuck without a dashboard and will explain as best I can how I think I got here.

After installing WordPress in my root directory and taking a stab at importing posts from a Blogger blog, I got adventurous and added a theme that I thought would be perfect.

At this time I had full access to the dashboard. I activated the theme and even dragged plugins to the various fields the theme offered.

But when I tried to look at my imported posts in the new theme, what I got was a less-than-craigslist-looking text display rather than the heavily-laid-out masterpiece I’d expected.

Then, when I tried to get back to the dashboard, I got stuck in this recursive loop wherein I’d login and, after a pause, get back to the craigslist version of my posts. I couldn’t get to the dashboard to make any changes.

What’s odd (to me, probably not to you) is that my original blogger blog is still up. I thought that when I went WordPress the index.html file would be overwritten by the new .php file. So I have the luxury of not having destroyed my old site (I’d made a backup in any case) but I can’t go forward in tweaking my theme in the dashboard.

Any suggestions would be helpful. Again, when I login I can’t get to the dashboard – I just get to a weird text version of my blog.