With all of your help, I was able to port the live site to a development area and I thank you for all of your help.
This morning, I updated some images and, after submitting the changes, I went to look on the front facing portion of the dev site. Only the page was coming up, like a page set to close status.
I went back into the entry > Options > and there is nothing to select - Open/Closed are not available.
This was followed by going to Admin> Channel Administration> Status> and both options are available.
I went to check other entries that I did not update any images and Open/Close - the status was available.
After which, I went into the db and ran this query:
SELECT *
FROM `exp_channel_titles`
WHERE STATUS = ""
LIMIT 0 , 30
The result set matched the entries that I was having issues with, and I changed the entries to status of "open" and everything is working as it should, which leads to my question.
What would prevent the status from being written to the database? Is there a file that I missed setting the permissions to 666 or 777?
Thanks in advance