Linking to a blog

Hi working on my first theme/wordpress site locally on my computer and ran into a problem. Not sure why this is happening …probably because i’m doing something wrong.

I create a few posts as a contributor would in the admin page, then in my index.php I use the loop to display the 5 most recent blogs with the title, author, excerpt and a continue link.

The code im using for each is:
” rel=”bookmark” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>” ><p style=”color:#a50f13;margin-top:20px;”>continue reading</p>

When I hit the link in my browser I am taken to a page that only contains my header, but the rest is blank without content.
The url that appears in the address bar is https://localhost/wordpress/?p=82. Each post is the same except for a different number.

I’m pretty sure i’m doing something wrong, could someone help me out.

Thanks