You know what...
After all this, my husband and I were trouble-shooting the site last night about the slowness issue and we found that the other code I had added to display the real names below the posts was slowing things down quite a bit! I think the host is not exactly lightning fast, but I'm kind of stuck with them right now.
Sooooo....I think I'm going to save all this for later. Maybe we can switch hosts at some point. I'm hoping the leaders of my organization don't notice that there are no longer names under the posts.

This was quite important to them. But, for now, it's just not going to work, since pages were sometimes taking up to 35 seconds to load!
THANK-YOU for all your help, though! It is so nice when people take the time to help newbies like me.