It really depends on your goal.
Templates only reach their full useful potential if you use software to do the webpage that can capitalise on them - dreamweaver does. This means you can then alter the template and have the whole site update. Doing it by hand is so mad they invented an entirely different solution called CSS to avoid that.
So if your webpage editor doesn't do that I'd just tweak your front page till you think it's ready and cut, paste & edit.
Or for a frequently updated site,
PHP Nuke or some such might be a good idea.
Unless you want to go all geeky and learn a ton of html & CSS, in which case, drop the tables, and and go CSS. This is a lot of work at first, but certainly worth it if you want to get serious about websites. CSS can also do some surprisingly advanced stuff, like dropdown menus with no javascript or the like. And a well thought out division of the html means you can the layout of your entire site just by changing the CSS document. Change colours graphics, typography whatever. (See the wonderful
CSS Zen garden for a prime example of this)
For that I recommend buying a "Idiot guide to" book as a gentle reference (flick through a few to see if you can follow the text - if not, dump it for one you can), especially for the CSS, then a few websites when you've outgrown the Idiot guide.
Although if you insist on doing it all online & free you can try this:
CSS course For general CSS stuff:
www.alistapart.com is a font of wisdom.
Position Is Everything details all those ridiculous ie bugs, and some other browsers' oddness.
Glish has barebones templates and ideas
As does
Bluerobot.com Html Dog has a lot of cutting edge ideas.
