Home Page and navigation problems

Hi,

I began trying to create a website using wordpress 6.71 and installed the 2022 theme. The documentation said it was customizable and supported static pages which was what I wanted. I looked at the default pages and they weren’t what I wanted so I went to customize template and made a few changes to the appearance – adding my own picture to the header block. I found a template ‘pages’ on the Templates tab and as it seemed just what I wanted I created a page from that template. However when I went to ‘Settings” on my site while I could see the page on the pages tab , I couldn’t select it as the home page as it didn’t appear on the dropdown box. I deleted the automatically created ‘sample page’. Now the option to set a home page has vanished from settings and the navigation menu in the Header section doesn’t appear at all. (I’ve tried emptying the caches and have published the pages(though set to private).

I’m guessing that somehow the page I’ve deleted has been set as home page- though I’m fairly sure I didn’t save it as such. What I don’t understand is why the ‘Home page’ that I created using the ‘pages’ Template didn’t appear in the drop- down for me to select? – that and why there’s no navigation of course..

Thanks for any help,

Al