WordPress - not so newbie friendly

You sit down at the computer. You're so excited. You've got this great idea for a website. You know exactly how you want it to look. You have most of the images saved to a special folder, labelled with the name of your new site. You're not familiar with this new platform but you've designed a couple other sites on other platforms so how hard can it be? You log in to WA, pull up the siterubix and log in to your new site. Now, to find a theme. You've learned in your course lesson that it's best to Keep It Simple but that doesn't quite fit with your vision. You're kind of partial to the parallax effect so you type parallax into the search. Awwwwe, there they are...all kinds of them. You scroll through until you find one that looks like it will fit with your vision. You click on the demo, check out the details and decide to try it out. You install it and after following the directions (updates, recommended plugins etc) head to the dashboard...appearance...hmmmm. First thing you notice is that it looks nothing like the demo. Now what? Theme user guide. You're instructed to install the companion plugin...already done. Next? Create menu...done. Next? Navigate to customizer. Each of the frontpage rows can be modified and/or hidden from the Customizer. Hmmmm not sure exactly what they mean by that...front page rows? And as you read on, the confusion grows. You realize that you don't know much of what they're referring to so you figure you'll just go through and change some things...see what happens. Maybe then you can link cause and effect. Nothing happens. Hmmmmmm. Maybe there's a more straight forward theme. After all, not all themes are created equal, right? There were a few that looked promising. Back to the drawing board...5 theme's later (and countless hours or should I say days) you come to the conclusion that you simply don't know enough about the nuts and bolts of wordpress to manipulate these themes to create the effect you're after. Now what? Google, of course. Lots of results...nifty little web development course (probably a good idea but 6 weeks plus fees, uh...no), HTML, XHTML and CSS For Dummies (also probably a good idea but would I have time to actually read it?...not likely), online XHTML video tutorials (monthly fee, so that's a no). Ah ha, WordPress.org/support – category:WordPress lessons...eureka! So folks, that's where I'm at. And that concludes my 3 month progress report. Thanks for baring with me. Have a good week, everyone :)