Hi Bob,
Welcome to the wonderful world of SBI
Do you remember where it said "No need to learn HTML"? I have had to learn more HTML with SBI than I thought possible! But now that I am through the beginning stages I am glad I was forced to learn. It gave me a much better understanding of the process, the why's and the why not's. My beginning pages took forever to build and now I can fly through building a page complete with HTML like it was nothing. That is not to say I still wouldn't like SBI to have wysiwyg editor.
If you use your blog editor be sure to copy only between the body tags so you don't copy unnecessary or duplicate meta tags or codes into SBI. This will cause even more problems.
Good Luck,