[support] Editing Primary Links

[Tom Holmes Jr.]

Hey guys .... everything is fine so far, and we are still evaluating 
Drupal .... we'll see what happens.

In any event, I have a static web-site that has about 800-900 pages .... 
yep almost 1000 static.html pages.
I want to port this to Drupal .... the issue is that every static HTML 
page controls the left, right, header, footer of the page .... all of 
which I want controll by Drupal.
What is the best way to do this?     And because I have done some 
research on this ... I am guessing ....

1) use the "Import HTML" module which I saw and import the web-site .... 
that might work for some pages ..... and I could do this for starters.

2) I could manually tear apart and go through the time and conversion to 
create proper blocks and remove the main content, the main body, and 
then create Drupal Page Content Types for that ....

3) I could create a new Menu system for this site and point to  URLs ... 
in this case they'd be files on the local server ... so maybe that won't 
work.

Should I even bother to use themes for this site?   I guess I have to 
use one theme, so I started creating a new theme from Newsportal.
So ... I was manually converting the first page .... I am modifying the 
page.tpl.php to add my own header and images ....
If this was any standard Apache web-site ... the images would be in one 
subdirectory under the root ... in this case, I took all the old images 
from the site and moved them to the
/sites/all/themes/newtheme/images directory ....
so now in this first page I have to create image src to 
"$base_path_url/sites/all/themes/newtheme/images/myimage.jpg"    is 
there a better shortcut than that?
I will look at other themes .....

The old web-site had it's own menu-bar at the top of the page, just 
under the header of the page.  I presumed that is Navigation?
I turned the primary links on and I get the Home | Create Content | My 
Account | News Aggregator | Administer | Log Out
The same as on the right-sidebar.   I want to make the primary links my 
own menu.   So, I am guessing I should turn off primary links in the 
page.tpl.php and use my own HTML code that was there originally.

So many questions .... so little time ....
If I need to provide any extra data, please let me know .....

And BTW ... Drupal 5.5 on Resin 3.1.4 is rock-solid .... for now .....