A plea for my Sanity

I am so frustrated!!

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to post buttons on my side bar.

I know it's supposed to be easy - I'm not great with computers, but I have to be missing something somewhere!

I've read article after article detailing how to do this and I. Just. Can't. Figure. It. Out.

{can you tell I'm about ready to scream??}

I am 90% positive that my problem lies in the fact that every  tutorial I have read says that my interface/dashboard WHATEVER should look like this...

But it doesn't. Mine looks like this:

I've tried reverting back to a classic design; copying & pasting my html codes for the blog design into that template designer... and all that got me was a blog looking like a list of html codes. :(

I've tried finding where in the html code these buttons should go and pasting the html code in but no such luck.

Suggestions?? Do you know of some amazing Tutorial I just haven't found? Am I just really missing something major?

Any help is appreciated because I seriously screamed at the computer this afternoon. Mind you, this is the fourth wasted afternoon I've spent fooling around with this crap.