How to modify Wordpress

Is there any easy way yet, to figure out what to disable on a Wordpress page?

Yes, learning how WordPress works and what elements present where.  Eventually you will need knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, and WordPress-specific functionality to gain full control.

Here is a video

Not going to watch it.  State your specific question.

How do I make the top navigation bar and the shoutbox thing go away on that page only?

Hi,

I have never worked with a theme like you have installed there, it does seem rather confusing. You may need to ask the developer of the theme for documentation on what each item does.

What I can tell you is

1. If you don't want the comment section to show up on a page, when creating or editing the page, look for the "Discussion" section, and choose to not allow comments and trackbacks. If you go to "Settings" ---> "Discussion", you can uncheck "Allow people to post comments on new articles", and commenting will be turned off by default for all new posts you write.

2. The top bar you should (depends on how the theme is made) be able to go to "Appearance" ---> "Menus" and modify the menu from there.  You should see a box on the left that says "Theme Locations" it should have some drop down menus, the one that says "Primary Navigation" should be the menu that you see in that bar on your site. So editing that menu should edit what is seen in that bar.

3. If you don't have any special looks for your pages, then you want "Default Template" as your template.

4. The parent should only be used if you want a hierarchical structure for your pages. Think of it as a tree structure. If you have a page  "About Us" and then you have pages "Directions" and "History", you could make "About Us" the parent of "Directions" and "History". It is a way to organize your content as well as it used to be a way to build multi-level drop down navigations. But you should be able to use the Menu editor to build any type of menu you want now.

I hope that helps.

To remove elements on a page, go to Appearance -> widgets. It will show you which widgets are available, and you can move them into the left or right sidebar or take them out.

Is there any quick way to see the various locations?  Surely there are static names for some of the areas on the screen?  Perhaps it's wishful thinking but I thought for sure that there would be something by now that could make figuring out what to change a little easier.

What is the name of the theme you are using and what area are you looking to change or remove?

Nan,

I'm pretty sure (from past questions) the OP is using Weaver to create "custom" themes.  Not all of the normal WordPress tips and tricks will be applicable :(

Thanks Jason. frugalmule - the content management program called Drupal makes it really easy to show/hide various parts of the page. But maybe you have to get this done with WP.

Yeah I am looking to get it done with WP.  It's quite troubling to still not have the ability to easily tell what to edit.

It's quite troubling to still not have the ability to easily tell what to edit.

It all has to do with your theme framework and a basic understanding of WordPress theme construction.  If you don't have those then mucking about deep in the theme code is not a recommended activity.  

If the menu exists on all pages it's because it is being called with header.php of your theme.  In header.php you have a line similar to this:

wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'header-menu' ) );

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that calls the menu code. To exclude it you would usually identify the page ID number and then use the is_page() function to create an if statement.  So if the pageID in question is 5, the if statement would look like:

if( is_page(5) ) {
        //do nothing
} else {
       wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'header-menu' ) );
}

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If Weaver is still the way it was a few years ago you may also have a zillion options in each edit screen to enable/disable various options.  If it is still buggy, you need to contact their support forum to get help with why isn't acting the way it should.

Do you use Firefox;s firebug to be able to right click on an element on the page to see what div it is in and what the styling rules are? Maybe you can change a style to be hidden? Chrome has a built in code inspector. Maybe you know this....

Thank you for the tip about the Chrome developer tools.  Still no luck identifying parts.  Here is a video of the procedure I followed http://screencast.com/t/6rzxENnrhR.  Thank you again for your help.

Great, glad you found it. Is this the site you want to remove elements from? You put the mouse over the part of the page you are looking for and right-click and choose "Inspect Element"
Sometimes you have to go up or down a few lines to see the whole element you are looking for.

It's funny that you say:
"I have limited desire to make a science project out of editing a Wordpress page "
because in the 14 years I have been doing web development, I have found that everything new becomes a time-consuming science project. It's the nature of the beast!

I just finally looked at your first video, I hadn't done that before because I thought I understood your problem, but this makes it much clearer.
The shout box and disclaimer are probably widgets, did you try going to the widget page and removing them?