i want to create Title categories on my left sidebar, that aren't links - just titles.

Just like WP already gives you "Categories", "Recent Posts", "Archives" - under which we create our categories and subcategories.

Example:

CATEGORIES (title, bolded, no link)
March
April
May June

ARCHIVES (title, bolded, no link)
January 2009
February 2009
March 2009

how do i create my own titles? thanks!!

Well if you want to create your own, just use the text widget and add whatever you want. You can even put in html (for links) if you want

i thought about that, but then how do i create categories to go under the new title (that i've created with the text widget). that title won't appear in the Categories page for me to order as parent/child categories...

when you say titles, do you mean the POST titles? Do you want a list of the post titles or are you asking how to change teh word 'Category' to something else and the word 'archive' to something else?

If you want to change teh word - go to the WP widgets page, open the sidebar in question, open the widget and you should be able to type in your own title.

i am talking about changing the name (eg: Categories to something else)

the problem is that

a) the original "Categories" name does not appear in my widget side bar (it appears on the published page, but not here in the back end in the left sidebar)

b) when i add an extra Category widget to the sidebar, i can change the title, but it pulls the original categories that i listed. the whole purpose of renaming the Title is so that i can have different sections (as you would with an online store...for eg:

Toys
(now list your categories)

Books
(now list your categories)

Clothes
(now list your categories)

i want to be able to name each new title and then only feature the categories i want to feature.

hope that made sense!

ok, have you added any widgets to the sidebar? If you never have, there are 5 that wordpress puts in as a default and you can't customize them. Once you add a widget in, you can customize it and the default ones go away.

So add the category widget to the sidebar and see if you can chnage the name.