For anyone reading this. I have figured it out. I had old HTML files in my root folder. Apparently they were throwing it off. For example i had a file in the root folder called about.html. After I deleted that, new wordpress page called About began to work.
I got the site back up after some working around, but I’m still back at the point I was in the beginning. THe homepage is fine at maindirectory.com. But every link I go to is formatted like: maindirectory.com/new/pagename. So I am back to where I started.
the plugin offered to change the domain. the choices were maindirectory.com and maindirectory.com. so i changed the top one to maindirectory.com/new and asked it to change it to maindirectory.com. now the entire site is FUBAR.
that didn’t work. that ended up bringing my entire site down.
