I use wordpress via fantastico in hostgator, and I did something last night to crash one of my sites. I was having trouble with it so I went into Fantastico and clicked on "remove" and of course got the warning message that said "this can't be undone!" so I X'd out and decided not to remove anything until I knew what was going on. Now I get crazy messages when I visit my site, and when I am in wordpress and click on anything such as "settings" "appearance", etc - I get "internal server error" and "404 not found" messages.

I guess my question is, can I go back into Fantastico and go ahead and delete this site, and then re-download it? I realize I will have to start the site from scratch which is no big deal - I just want to make sure I in fact CAN re-download the site if I do go ahead and delete it. Any info at all is much appreciated. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ok well I went ahead and talked to hostgator who fixed it for me. It was as easy as deleting it and then re-downloading, but some additional files also had to be deleted that I could not find, so HG helped me with that. Pretty painless considering I crashed my whole site. Thank goodness site was in early stages and only had a few pages because I had to re-build from scratch. Lesson learned... I hope!!!!!!!!!

I personally never have used a control panel, but if you want to update wordpress, use the built-in function.

If I'm right, you just have to give wordpress your site FTP credential, and it will do everything alone from there.
Downloading the new version, replacing the files, and updating itself.

when you are on your dashboard, and that a new version is available, if you click that link, you should have a button "upgrade wordpress automatically".

I really don't know why I was advised to use a host with wordpress. It's a new way of site building for me, and I guess with anything, you just get used to it.
I think I saw something like that in my dashboard when I logged in earlier. I will go check it out... thank you!!
Liz