No, you are still a bit confused.

Word's Normal View does not show the footers--it just shows the main body of
text, without margins/footers/headers, etc.

Word's Print Layout or Page Layout view shows the margins, effectively
showing the page as it would normally look--however, you do not have to be
in Print Layout view to insert a page number or view a header, as if you are
in Normal View it will switch you to Print Layout view.

Web Layout view, I think, is totally irrelevant to this question, and fairly
useless unless you plan on saving as HTML.  If you are just writing regular
documents, you can ignore it.  Perhaps you have it confused with Normal
View? They do look slightly similar.

There is no problem in switching between Normal View and Print Layout View,
and many professional or long document writers type all their text in Normal
View and switch into Print Layout only when they are doing finishing
formatting and are almost ready to print.

I don't know why Insert | Page Number would have been ghosted out. Possibly
because at that exact moment the cursor was somewhere you could not insert
it, say, in a footnote or comment.

Hope that helps,
DM