OK, I have been working on this off and on as that's all the time I'm able to devote to it. Thank you all for your help. I have now my live site and a test site going. Hostgator was causing my previous troubles, they were putting it in maintenance mode and leaving it there when I never requested that.
Anyway, my current issue now is that I cannot log into my test admin to work on my new (test) site. My password doesn't work. I looked all through the the install steps and I put all the correct info in the configure.php pages. The password that is on that page is for the database which is attached tot he test site fine. I never set a password for the test site. I am using the same username for the test side as for my live side, does that make a difference? Should I change the username? Can I do that if I've already established the user for my new database?