after searching around a little, I found that (as you may have noticed) I’m a newbie in wordpress…. there is no need to screw with code to do this
I had never seen the “Menus” option in the administration side bar…. so … go there and create a new menu…
from which you can put custom links, links to the categories, to the pages you already have and when you are happy with the result, just save it, and in the Theme locations little widget at your left, select which menu you want to go in which position in your theme…. and thats it….
if further ilustration is required ask me