BuddyPress.org

I am a complete novice to both Buddypress and WordPress. Neither me nor my friends are skilled in web site development. I am an R&D analyst creating financial products. I am also an amature graphic artist. Of our group of friends, I was chosen for this task because I am the least unskilled. I have built an HTML web site before. Bluehost is hosting our domain, lolfriends.net and they have installed both WordPress and Buddypress. I have set up a partially completed html based web site there and the WP/BP is loaded into a subfolder. My hope has been to link that site to the WP/BP portion of the site where a visitor would have to sign in before they could comment or otherwise engage in dialog with the members,

WP/BP has been installed for a week. I just look at it> I have no idea what must be done first. Set up login criteria, create a page -but what whould be on it? How do I control what is on the page or where it is displayed on a page. How can I control the page size or the background color or the number of columns on the page? How do I place phots on a page and put an opportunity to place a caption and comment with them.

At some future time we would like to place ads for local small business on our site so that we can support our neighbors. How do I do that?

Mostly I just need help in knowing what to do to get started and the order in which those tasks must be done. I have read portions of the Codex (there are a lot of pages there). It didn’t tell me an order of tasks or how to make the pages look like the rest of my site. I did learn that PHP is dramatically different from HTML and that what little I though I knew is worthless.

Can anyone give me some suggestions on how I can get going with this? What should I do first. Right now I am afraid to do anything for frear that it will turn out that I should have set something else up first. My friends are depending on me. I don’t want to let them down. Thank you for any help you can give.