Dear Becca,
(I love your avatar – too cute!)
Your questions answered:
1. By grey boxes around everything – I assume you mean the images?   To remove these, go to Appearance>>Edit, and find the Style.css- should be listed at the bottom of the right-hand side.
- scan through that file until you find:
a img {border: 3px solid grey; [...]

This post is the third in a series called, “Save the Sidebar!”  Click on the button below to start at the beginning!

A lot of you use <br> tags to accomplish a space between sidebar items.  Although this will work, it will interfere with validating your site, it will probably be deprecated pretty soon, AND it [...]

WordPress is a very user-friendly back-end to your blogs.  The stuff that you enter – your text, images, videos, comments, go into WordPress’s engines and they do their “thing” to publish it all classy-like.  There are THREE areas of your blog that skip the WordPress engines.  They take your text and publish it directly to [...]

Q:  Why is my sidebar swinging below my content?
A:  9 times out of 10, it is the same reason: there is an unclosed division within an html/text widget.  Hang in there with me, I intend to explain this in English, I promise.
The Problem:
Your browser thinks that your sidebar belongs with the main content area.  If [...]

One of the risks of blogging is that a lot of your best writing may get lost under a pile of reverse chronologically organized posts.  Let’s keep the best writing front and center, shall we?
Built-In Organization
1.  Use PAGES like they were intended.  From the WordPress codex:

Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and [...]

Yes, and it is completely safe to press that blue link at the top and complete the auto-upgrade.
FIRST – I have one recommendation. Go to the plugin screen,

2 – Select all plugins using the top checkbox

3.  Use the bulk options from the drop down menu to “deactivate” all the plugins.
4.  Then proceed  to click [...]