Creating Page template

You’ll want to edit or create a file called page.php and make all your changes there. Pages will use page.php first, then default to index.php if page.php doesn’t exist. index.php is what posts (and everything else unless otherwise specified) uses. Check out the hierarchy here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

You don’t need a page template if you want to affect all pages… just a page.php file. If you want to target specific pages, then you’ll need a page template. Good luck.

It appears you are correct. How annoying…