giving wp its own directory – theme problem maybe? codex not helpful

I’m trying to get the index.php of

https://www.elepent.com/wordpress/

where wp is installed to show up at elepent.com/

When I follow the codex I run into the following issues:
step 7 – my .htacces file is not in the wordpress/ folder, it’s already in the www/ folder, I don’t know if that matters.
step 8 & 9 – the theme I’m working with doesn’t have this line in the index.php file, and I’m not sure where it might be [i’ve looked high and low, but my understanding of php is pretty limited]

I tried switching the theme back to one of the default themes, just to see if I could get it to work, but I’m not having any luck there either.

Would it be easier to just re-install everything into the root directory and deal with it that way, or is there a simple fix for this?

Thanks in advance.