Getting Started in WordPress

My second and third posts were just put in to see how a few themes worked for me in WordPress. I had a few things on my wishlist. I wanted to be able to:

1. Have a menu that only had the first letter of each word in Capitals. I hate seeing menu items with all the letters in capitals. I had to accept with my current theme that my name would appear in capitals sadly.
2. I wanted to choose a free theme. (already this item and the previous item ruled out most themes).
3. I wanted to have my first post always appear at the top of the first page. This meant my theme had to have “sticky” posts. I explored using widgets to have instructions in a separate column but found not all themes allowed this to be done easily.
4. I wanted all or at least much of each post to appear on the screen the first time it was looked at.
5. I wanted a simple theme with only 1-2 columns.
6. I did not want too much screen real estate to be used up at the top of the page. The third theme I eventually chose (Highwind) was a little compromise but at least the menu items were always visible as I scrolled down the page (on a desktop machine).
7. Since part of the reason for this blog was to help others learn from my journey, I wanted to be able to view posts in chronological order as well as the usual reverse chronological order. I discovered this was not theme dependent.
8. Infinite Scroll. I wanted more posts to load automatically when the “bottom” of the page was reached.
9. Group blog. I wanted a number of people to be able to contribute to the blog. It sounds like many themes have this feature.