Sidebar links and pages missing

Hi everyone!

Im new to blogging and having a hard time figuring out how to change the code to get my sidebar to work properly. Ive been reading online the things people are trying in order to correct the problem but I just make a mess of things …. I really just think its because I don’t understand what Im reading in the first place. Kudos to those of you that understand this stuff! Its really complicated!

Anyway I cant get my Link Categories to show up or my pages (About and Contact).
When I go to Design – Widgets it says

No Sidebars Defined

You are seeing this message because the theme you are currently using isn’t widget-aware, meaning that it has no sidebars that you are able to change. For information on making your theme widget-aware, please follow these instructions.

I followed the instructions and reallllly made a mess of things so I just reloaded all the original php pages back onto the server lol.

This is the code for my sidebar

<div class="left_bg">
							<div class="left_line">&nbsp;</div>
							<div class="search"><?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . "/searchform.php"); ?></div>
							<div class="sub_left">
								<div class="cats_bbg">
									<div class="cats_bg1">
										<div class="sub_cats">
											<div class="left_head">Categories:</div><br style="line-height:7px "/>
											<ul>
												<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0'); ?>
											</ul>
										</div>
									</div>
								</div>
								<div class="cats_bbg2">&nbsp;</div>
								<div class="cats_bbg">
									<div class="cats_bg2">
										<div class="sub_cats">
											<div class="left_head">Archives:</div><br style="line-height:7px "/>
											<ul>
												<?php get_archives('monthly','10','custom','<li>','</li>'); ?>
											</ul>
										</div>
									</div>
								</div>
								<div class="cats_bbg2">&nbsp;</div>

								<div class="cats_bbg">
									<div class="cats_bg3">
										<div class="sub_cats">
										<?php
 $link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");
 foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
 ?>
											<div class="left_head"><?php echo $link_cat->cat_name; ?></div><br style="line-height:7px "/>
											<ul>
												<?php get_links($link_cat->cat_id, '<li>', '</li>', '<br />', FALSE, 'id', TRUE,
TRUE, -1, TRUE); ?>
											</ul><br style="line-height:10px "/>
											<?php } ?>
										</div>
									</div>
								</div>

								<div class="cats_bbg2">&nbsp;</div>
								<div class="cats_bbg">
									<div class="cats_bg4">
										<div class="sub_cats">
											<div class="left_head">Meta:</div><br style="line-height:7px "/>
											<ul>
												<?php wp_register('<li>', '</li>'); ?>
	<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>
	<li><a href="https://validator.w3.org/check/referer" title="This page validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional">Valid <abbr title="eXtensible HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</abbr></a></li>
	<li><a href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/"><abbr title="XHTML Friends Network">XFN</abbr></a></li>
	<li><a href="https://www.ads-software.com/" title="Powered by WordPress, state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform.">WordPress</a></li>
	<?php wp_meta(); ?>
											</ul>
										</div>
									</div>
								</div>

							</div>
						</div>
						<div class="left_bg" style="height:12px ">&nbsp;</div>
						<div class="left_line">&nbsp;</div>