lots of custom pages, heavy content styling – how to best setup?

I’m new to WP, comfortable with HTML & CSS, and hoping to leverage WP for it’s strong backend/plugin structure.

I want to build a site with lots of uniquely styled static pages and am looking for guidance about how to best implement this.

Say, for instance I wanted a page with static content like this:

<div class="intro">
   <h1>Welcome to the site!</h1>
   <h2>It's the best.</h2>
   [embed YouTube vid here]
</div>
<div class="moreContent>
   [some pics added in a ul and arranged in a fancy way]
   <p>Lots of words. You get the point.</p>
</div>

Two possibilities for getting this into wp immediately occur to me:
1) Write my content as above, paste it into Dashboard>Pages>Add New>Dialogue box. Style in style.css. Maybe even add a custom template to place some widgets where I want them around this content.
2) More or less add all of my content into a custom template php file. Style in style.css

Are either of these the most efficient way to go about building this? Any high-level advice is appreciated. I plan to make lots of static content (i.e., not post) pages, so advice now would be really valuable. Thanks!