first time wordpress site builder, having difficulty changing my homepage

I am re-building my website myself after the person I hired to do it didn't do such a hot job. I was following along with a tutorial, but have gotten stuck.

Here's where I'm at. I have everything installed and wound up changing my mind on the names for my menu's in the header. When i changed them, they didn't show up as changed when I hit the home button. However, when I click on the link for a menu that has been changed I am taken to a page with an error, but up on the right hand corner I see then new menu.

Also, when I'm logged in as an admin on my site and I'm at the home page, there is no option to make any changes or customizations as an admin. If I want to get to the dashboard I have to go to one of the other menu buttons besides home, click that then all the admin access pops up.

Even when I tried deleting the home page (and deleting all the trash permanently) and creating a new one, it automatically defaults to the way it looked before I deleted it. Very bizarre.

Is there something I can to fix this? I'm about to just delete the whole thing and start over again. I thought I'd ask here first since this is my first time doing this. Plus, I think building websites is actually a pretty cool thing to do!

Any help or words of wisdom is appreciated.

Thanks