Insert Into My Own Design

1. make sure your page is saved as a .php file rather than .htm or .html.
2. add the call to wp-blog-header.php at the top
3. at the start of where you want your entries to go, insert this code:<?php if ($posts) : foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>
4. at the end of where you want your entries to go, insert this code:
<?php endforeach; else: ?>
<?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
5. the actual format of your entries is dictated by the template tags. search for ‘template tags’ on the codex or wiki. you do not have to use the exact same code quoted by macmanx, but it is a good starting point.
6. archives, calendars, etc are inserted by putting the relevant template tag where you want them to appear.
if this isn’t enough perhaps you should email the wordpress-pro mailing list and request that a professional convert the template for you.

No thats fine, I want to be able to do it myself, I’m a web designer from a HTML and CSS background and I am trying to learn CMS and PHP as wells as MySQL. So this is good for me to do this rather than pay some one to do it for me. I’ll have ago at this tomorrow morning, thanks for the help so far.
I suppose I can use WordPress as much or as little as possible, in other words I can just have it pull in the posts and list a recent article’s in the sidebar.

Ok doing well so far, problem is that when I am displaying the date of the article within the loop, it is only working for the top article any subsequent articles below are not displaying the date.
This is the code:
<div id=”content”>
<p id=”slogan”>Freelance Web Designer, Chester, UK…
<dl>
<dt>What Do I Do?</dt>
<dd>I am a freelance web designer based in Chester, and I specialise in producing web content that meets web standards.</dd>
</dl>
<hr size=”1″ class=”linebreak” />
<p class=”byline”>Recent Articles
<?php if ($posts) : foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>
<h3 id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></h3>
<p class=”article”>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<div id=”updatedBox”>
<p class=”updated”><?php the_date(); ?> | <span class=”viewComment”><?php comments_popup_link(__(‘Comments (0)’), __(‘Comments (1)’), __(‘Comments (%)’)); ?></span>
</div>
<?php wp_link_pages(); ?>
<?php include(ABSPATH . ‘wp-comments.php’); ?>
<?php endforeach; else: ?>
<?php _e(‘Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.’); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>