WordPress lets you set up a website that looks more like a site than a blog. You can create “pages”, and compose hierarchical site navigation by putting a list of pages in a sidebar or header. There are any number of pre-packaged themes that give you multi-column templates, and you can use widgets to put navigation and other content into the sidebars.
So, how do you put the pages in the order you want? The sidebar widget lets you choose the sort order – alphabetical, or something called “page order.” What the heck is that? After some “I feel dumb” searching, I looked at a page. There is a small section to the left of the page that lets you add a number which sets the sort order. So if you want your navigation pages to be sorted 1-5, you go into each page, and put the right number for each page. Kinda clunky but works
Since it took me some extra time to figure this out, I wrote this post to help others.