My question is this: can I create the navigation using widgets instead of creating a custom menu with parent and child pages?

Yes, you can create a custom menu in Appearance → Menus and then add a "Custom Menu Widget" to the sidebar to show that menu.

Here are the related help pages for those two things in case they help:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/custom-menu-widget/

@corollamom3, I bet we can fix up the ribbon issue if you want to try. If you do, please create a new help request and make sure to include a link to your blog.

My question is this: can I create the navigation using widgets instead of creating a custom menu with parent and child pages?

Thanks in advance for your guidance.

I am using the Delicacy theme and was trying to delete the ribbon and the bottom part of the standard header.

First, I think you need to get your menus in order. It looks like you created two separate menus, but both are currently empty. If you look at Appearance → Menus → Manage Locations, you'll see "side main menu" selected for the main (top) navigation. You probably wanted to set that to "Top Menu" instead. Which ever menu you decide to choose there, go back to the "Edit Menus" tab and select the one you picked in the other tab. Ahhhh, now I see part o the problem. You've set every post to be private. You can't add private posts or pages to menus. They have to be published first. You can do that and still keep the blog itself private so no one can see it if you go to Settings → Reading and change the "Site Visibility" option to the option that says, "I would like my site to be private, visible only to users I choose."

It seems like you've bumped into an unfortunate sequence of events that conspired against you! Keep at it though, once you get it untangled after this, it should be much easier!

I also would like for it to tell me if the code should go all on one line or be spread across multiple lines.

Good feedback. I wonder if this should be covered in tutorials and not in the welcome comment. I feel like there are a lot of basics that could be covered, and it's hard to pick out the right best ones when you want to keep an intro message very short!

In your example above it looks like it spans 3 lines - is this necessary, and why?

It's more readable that way. Proper spacing for any kind of code is a best practice that will help you if you continue to use it and if you collaborate with others (or ask for help in forums). In general, it's a good idea to have good code formatting. Check out this related page about CSS coding standards in WordPress:
http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/css/

Or could you put it all in one line and it would have the same effect?

It would have the same effect. Actually, many sites, including WordPress.com, minify the CSS later so it's all on one line. It's more efficient for servers to read the CSS that way, but it's better to give any CSS that humans read better spacing than that. :)

I think the default message is ok but it should tell the user to replace the text with theirs but leave the /* there on either end (if that is, in fact what you are supposed to do...as I said, I'm still not sure)

The /* indicates the start of a comment.

/* This is an example of a CSS comment. */

Lafemmelatina, I would suggest starting with seeing how the background color changes - in firefox, right click on your page and select 'inspect element'. The css code shows up on the right hand side. On my site, one of the first codes I get is

body.custom-background {
background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);
}

with 255,255,255 being white. So if you change one of those numbers to say 0 or 20 or 100, you'll get a different color background.

That's the kind of baby step I was looking for just to see if I was heading down the right street - I hope this helps you too!

But...I tried the little snippet you provided - my front page didn't have any text in it, but I added some text in. It tells me it saved, and is published, but the words don't turn to red. So, although I think I'm doing it right, it's just not changing anything. I have access to a mac so I am going to try on that but I don't think it's my computer...I am using firefox 20 and yesterday in an attempt to get the preview going, support had me clear cookies, cache, run all the tests and so on and so on. I'm stumped as to why I'm not getting anything at all in the preview, with your code or the mine that I tried above.

body.custom-background {
    background-color:blue;
}

Note that it's tricky but not impossible to figure out once you get the hang of how to find which CSS selectors to use. One of the best ways to do that is to use your browser's web inspector tool. To activate it, right click on any element (i.e. the body element) and select "Inspect Element." It should pull up a panel with the HTML for what you clicked on as well as all the CSS that applies to it. You can usually find a selector in the CSS that is just the one you'll need to make the update you want. Here is an example: http://f.cl.ly/items/201h1T0T2I1b463t2P2F/Screen%20Shot%202013-04-26%20at%209.11.26%20PM.png

Getting back to your request, it sounds like what you want is a basic CSS tutorial in general. I think this one is a good one for getting started:
http://www.htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginner/

Editing CSS is not always a simple thing to thing to break into if you're not already familiar with HTML, so a basic HTML would also be a good thing to cover:
http://www.htmldog.com/guides/html/beginner/

And if you're just looking for a simple example to try out in the Appearance → Themes → Customize → CSS panel, one that I usually test with is turning all the paragraphs red in a preview (just so you can see the change working), here is a CSS snippet for that:

p {
     color: red;
}

body
{
background-color:blue;
}

I save this, and it tells me it's saved, but then my background doesn't change to blue.

If you are able to share any baby steps I would appreciate them too!

See: http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/editing-css/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/custom-fonts/

See also: http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/where-is-the-theme-css-and-how-do-i-edit-it/

Im using wordpress from last 4 years, my big and top blog is superb ...

2 weak before.,in 1 day i got 120000+ visitors ..i love to use wordpress.. but there are few things which we really need in wordpress.

they r not something very BIG ,but important for us. so What I was saying...that if wordpress is creating some utility they must give new options.

1) Add profile link option to add google plus profile link.on profile tab. this small requirement but important.

2) remove sitemap limit....my website having 1400+ article..only 1000 is listed in site map.

3) Google added image sitemap option.word press should add image sitemap.either in existing map or create a sitemap for image.

i noticed sometime site map shows images list.,sometime not... this is showing lots of warnings in Google webmasters..

4) atlst give us option to keywords in home page of blog.currently we don;t add tag line.we using tag line,add lots of keywords and this destroys header layout. [I KNOW WORDPRESS DON'T ALLOW FOR SECURITY...BUT WHAT PROBLEM WE WILL GET ] JUST YOU HAVE CHANGE THE TAGLINE AND KEYWORDS...

as your application name is theme Customize r these options will be perfect.

if company plan to remove old style,then you can updated that the way dashboard was changed, to do that a tool was not developed like theme customize.

im sure all users will agree and 4 option ,every BLOG WILL USE ... as far as i feel.

so,pls think...talk with seniors..this is something important and we need it badly...

pls ignore mistakes..

Can Any one tell me what was the use of Customizer option,when all those things customizer allow to do can be done in normal way (via settings tabs) ?

Good question! The main benefit is being able to see the changes live as you make them (a major different compared to the old way). Also, note that old way of changing the appearance settings will probably go away in the future. It's a transition period.

An update on my 9.44am post. It seems there is a conflict going on, the Custom Design colours overrides any settings you try to create via Appearance/Backgrounds.

When you open the customizer, you should see the settings you saved in Appearance → Backgrounds visible and then you can change them from there. I've just double checked this to make sure it's working as it should, so I think if you were having any trouble before it has been sorted out now.

I'm happy to look if you find any other troubles with the Theme Customizer.

@ctpilates, I sent ya a reply by email.

@ccongdn2010, yes, when you re-purchase an expired Custom Design upgrade, the settings should go back to whatever you last saved before the upgrade expired. Looks like you got your domain issue worked out as well.

@theobamacrat, this thread has nothing to do with reblogging and it wasn't having any trouble at the time you posted before. If you still need help, please start a new thread.

Can Any one tell me what was the use of Customizer option,when all those things customizer allow to do can be done in normal way (via settings tabs) ?

If You really want to give customize option then atlst give adding meta tags,descriptions options...then it can be useful.else all things can be done via settings tabs.

The problem remaining is thus Chunk adding a white solid layer that cannot be customised rather than the transparent layer that was there before.

Sorry for the post overload trying to work out all the issues here!

I set a background image, tell it to tile vertically and it saves out as an entire full page background.