Thread: Formatting Links on Self Hosted Wordpress

I think I know the answer to these questions but I need a couple of nods before I mess something up.

If you go to my site www.resourceful-mom.com, you will be redirected to the ip address instead of the site name. Before I transferred my Wordpress blog to Blue Host, I was able to change/alter page names. On Wordpress.com (the free site), these are called Slugs. Now that I'm on Blue Host, my links have the ip address and the page names aren't descriptive at all. Now, my page names are called Permalinks, instead of Slugs.

Now to my question (whew!):

• Now that I'm self hosting, do I have to "name" my pages the same as I would if I were creating them in HTML from scratch? Or, is there a different way to handle this? I know that the url is used when search engines do their searchy thingy and I don't think I'll be found with 66.55.blah.blah/548058?, just a thought.
• There is little to no formatting (paragraph indentions, spacing between paragraghs, etc) taking place. Is this as result of the Wordpress theme I chose, is there a plugin/widget that I need to download or will I need to input HTML coding on each page to accomplish formatting?

Just wanted to note that I've been digging through the history of this particular forum and I found a post from WindowsTalk with the same, or very similar, question as mine. Please weigh in if you have any advice but from what I can tell from the previous post, I need to look for my style.css sheet for formatting and on another post, I think Lisa explained that it's ok to update via the PermaLinks.

Please feel free to still weigh in if you have any insight or if you know of anything changing recently as these posts were from earlier this year.

Thanks all!

This WP plug-in was recommended to me by another member here and it has helped to redirect certain 'old' pages to the new ones:
http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

(I had moved from Blogger to WP on a sub-domain to where it is now on Host Gator, so my situation may be slightly different from yours)

Thanks! It actually got worse before it got better, my initial changes resulted in http://www.mysite.com/http:/www.mysite.com at one point but I finally got it figured out.
I'd like to change my site colors, or at least add an image to my header, and I want a left nav but I haven't been able to find a plugin that is compatible. Thinking, in between building pages, I'll check out CSS and PHP on Lynda. WP has instructions, but it's a little had to understand.