Cannot link articles to menus in Joomla! 1.5.4, cannot move forward.

[silentcommotion]

Hi,

I am quite new to website building and this is the first time I am building my own website with Joomla! 1.5.4, with a free template named "lostusflower" obtained from Joomlashack. After reading a few quick tutorials and watching several videos about Joomla! 1.5.4, this is what I have been able to accomplish on veeralsolanki.com/joomla. I have two sections, Professional and Personal. The Professional section has these categories: Home, Experience, Skillset, Education, Honors and Contact Me. The Personal section has one category named "My Interests".

I have two menus on the homepage as you can see: Main Menu and Top Menu. To test the menu system, I created an article named "My experience" (Section - Professional, Category - Experience) and added this text to it, "Hello, here you will find information about my experience". I also created a menu item called "Experience" for the top menu, as Category Blog Layout, for the Professional/Experience combination, or in other words, for the Experience category. After these steps, I assumed that when I would click on "Experience" in the top menu, it should lead to me a new page in the same window with the Category Blog Layout and the text, "Hello, here you will find information about my experience", instead, it leads me to a page which says, "404 - Component not found" (I am attaching a screenshot of this error page). Why would this happen, what am I missing?

As you can see, the article about experience appears on the home page instead. When I click on the "Home" menu item in the top menu, I get the same error page. I get the same error page with all the top menu items and the main menu items even after linking them to different articles . The only link which works is the "Home" menu item in the main menu.

I have been struggling with this for one and a half days now and I can't figure out what's wrong. Is it the template itself, or am I doing something wrong? The template is a free template under the Edit tab for the template, it says "Menus: Cannot assign default templates" under "Menu Assignment" and "The parameter file /templates/lotusflower/params.ini is unwritable! " under "Parameters". I have edited some parts of the template through the HTML editor for the template (I know very little about PHP and HTML). I went back and read the tutorials again and watched videos, but nothing is lighting a bulb in my head. I would greatly appreciate all help on this issue. I am quite new to all this, so if I missed on providing any critical data to solve this problem please let me know.

Edit: I am attaching the screenshots of the configurations of the Category Experience, top menu item Experience and the Category Experience Article "My Experience", if that would help figure out the problem.