Matthew Gedeon

To clarify, in the admin area for widgets, you have placed the widget in the sidebar area, and you can change settings for it, save it, but the widget won’t show on the front end?

Try turning all plugins off, then turn on the plugin. If you can add your widget and it work, then turn on the other plugins one at a time, testing to make sure the widget is still working. Eventually, you’ll probably turn one on and the widget will stop working and you can let both plugins authors know that their plugins don’t work well together.

If with all other plugins off, you can’t get the widget to work, then switch to the twentyeleven theme and try again. If the widget works now, run through the same steps as above. If it does not work, then the plugin itself is to blame.

Most of the time when things like this happen, it’s a social sharing plugin or something that has outdated code and is interfering with your widget, but it could be that the plugin author has released a version of the plugin that simply doesn’t work with your host (less likely but possible).

Easiest way would be the classic bring everything down and then bring them up one at a time. What you want to do is start by deleting the platform theme (download to your computer if it has been customized) then try logging in. If it works, try a fresh install of platform. (I suspect you have a theme issue, but we don’t have enough data yet to tell for sure.) If not, then rename your whole plugins theme to plugins.hold. This will effectively allow you to reset all plugins and the theme. If the problem is one of the plugins, then you can move them one at a time into the plugins folder (which you may have to create) and activate them in wordpress, thus isolating the problem.
With no plugins, and the trouble theme deleted, if you still can’t get in, let us know. I would be out of ideas, but I bet someone else could help.

Have you modified your theme in any way? (excluding, of course, customizations in the admin area.)

To answer your original question, the look of the menu is controlled by the theme. For reasons I’m not going to go into, it would be difficult to make a plugin that controlled the look of the menu, while working across different themes. The css for the menu in the link above will only work if it goes in the style sheet for the theme you’re using. Which theme you have selected is displayed in a box above all the file names. You can click on it to change it if you need to.

Are you sure you want to be your own webmaster? You can save money, but if it takes you away from something else, it’s not really saving you money and can result in a headache.
If you have decided that this is something you must do, then first you want to switch to the twenty ten theme(under “appearances”, “themes” then test. If it works, you’ve got an old theme that will either need to be update, or you’ll need to choose a different one. If that doesn’t fix the problem, you’ll need to download and figure out how to use an ftp client. FTP could be thought of as the back door to a site, vs the front door of logging into WordPress. As it’s a very powerful tool, you don’t want to share your login credentials with anyone you don’t trust explicitly. Never even consider posting them on the internet. You can contact your host to have them help you find your login credentials, or read their help file on ftp. You’ll probably want to use filezilla as it’s the most popular client. Here’s instructions for use. Us the credentials from the host, and follow the instructions esmi linked to for resetting the plugins folder(ftp method, not the phpmyadmin method). DO NOT DELETE ANYTHING! Only rename that folder. So long as you don’t go deleting stuff, you’re safe enough with ftp, but you could incapacitate your site by deleting files haphazardly. Follow instructions carefully, or hire a professional. It shouldn’t take long for a pro to get to the bottom of the problem.

I’m not sure how to help you since this is what I’m seeing after clearing cache, and in three different browsers on two different operating systems. My only conclusion is that we have to be looking at different things.

Try deactivating Lightbox 2.

I just got there from the link you provided http://sugarandcloth.com/. This is kind of weird. Make sure you are loging in at http://sugarandcloth.com/wp-admin and tell me if you’re getting the same results.