Newbie could use suggestions on organizing a site conversion to GS :-)

[yojoe]

You will have to prepare two templates. One for homepage, second for rest of the pages.
Content boxes might be created with more than 1 method, where among the others you can load other page content into them, use components, or dedicated plugins like customfields.
In second template you will have to split content area into a sidebar, which will contain a submenu, and main content.

You will find info about template creation and loading content in wiki, and in latest threads on this forum.
Check out GS extend to see what plugins are available.