basic templates not working

good morning. im new to wordpress so i feel like i may be missing something major, but ive looked through the wiki to no avail.

i want to use one blog and have various pages they show subsets of the posts (based on categories, say). it appears the way to do this is to set up a Template that includes the Loop in some modified form, and then to create a Page that implements the template.

on the simplest level, i try to do this by creating a Template that merely copies the code from the Main Index Template, and base a Page on it, with a little bit of header text.

when i do this, i get the header text and nothing else. should i not also be getting the index entries?

what am i missing?

– bigode