Trouble getting CONTENT…

I am new to creating themes in wordpress. I have a website and a blog, which were created separately of each other. A designer came up with the look, and one coder did everything up until the blog part. Then another programmer did the blog part and used different css styles and images, so it’s not optimal at all.

I want to take the HTML and CSS and create my own theme, which I have done, and put everything in wordpress and use it as a CMS.

I’ve broken it up into header, footer, index.php, and my stylesheet. So I thought that, once I did that, I could create static pages, and drop the html of the content portions of the respective pages, and they would all come together to look like my website. I took the content out of index.php and put it into a page, and got nothing, except my header and footer. No content.

Do I have a misunderstanding of how this should work?