Creating News, Work and Blog Post Types

Hi ya,
how are you doing?

I’m a WordPress novice who is setting up a new website where I need to achieve some fairly simple (but clearly a bit tricky for me!) functionality.

I’m starting from scratch using Themble’s Bones Theme on a localhost.

Essentially the site is a news, portfolio and blogging platform. I intend to use custom posts for news, work and blog updates to my site and have a single database.

I would like these post categories to have their own section in the menu and also to be able to use widgets that display each of these post categories.

So far I have been unable to do any of this.

I have been able to download the Custom Post Type Plugin only to realize that it does not let me set a custom post type within the custom menu.

Please excuse my explanation, I am unschooled in the rhetoric of WordPress.

I am hoping a wandering WP expert will spot this post, take pity on my digital struggles and offer me sage advice to guide me on this quest.

Thank you