Reorganising the blog - The struggle continues

Reorganising the blog

Given that I have the time to confront this one on the to do list this evening and I thought an idea as to why my earlier attempts had not worked 

1. I checked that I had a Dynamic view enabled ( I believe that this is the latest version of the template tool) I did 
2. I made sure that I had the pages widget on my widget list and that that its now in the order I want it in and found it to be the case its even in the right place, at the top of the posts field. 
3. Looked at my Blog and found that I could not see the pages widget at all and that the drop down list on the navbar was still unchanged.
4. I went back to the layout settings page and made sure I had saved every thing and found that I had 
5. So thinking that the Navbar which displays across the top of the posts field might be hiding the pages widget I edited the appearance of the Navbar to make it transparent.
6. Going back and looking at the blog I found that this had no effect 
7. further and as an aside I noticed my page view count was going up and discovered that my page views where being tracked despite my not wanting this and turning it off in the past - is there any way to turn this off permanently?
8. I went back through the options  for displaying the blog, from the drop down menu  and found that I still did not like any of them exempt classic but more importantly none of them seemed to have the slightest effect on the viability of the pages Widget. 

 I am still some what confused by the lay out tools and seemingly unable to change the layout and not at all sure why

The following are screen shots of what I have seen - Posted actual size for clarity

 The only thing I can think of and have not yet tried is removing the Navbar widget altogether