General Publishing with a Photoshop Template

I have been all over the web trying to get some answers and I come here and see everyone ask the same question - so at least I know I'm not alone!

Background - I taught myself FrontPage 1998(?), used to understand basic html (am a little rusty now ) - now have FP 2003, Dreamweaver (never used yet), CS2 with PhotoShop, Image Ready and GoLIve.

I have built some fairly basic websites in the past - they were primarily for volunteer organizations so needed to be functional not flashy. I used (and liked) shared borders and tables to create my structure. I like being able to update things at will - adding pages, changing content and such.

Now I have a business where I want to have a more professional website - but didn't want to spend tons of money and be tied to someone else updating it. I found a couple of templates that I liked. They come in psd files and my daughter is helping me make the color changes and whatnot.

But nowhere in the template site do I see any tutorial on how to actually get it up on to the web! I would love to be able to use FP (since I am familiar with it) but am also open to DW or GoLive.

The template has a top and left side banner which would lend themselves to shared borders - do I somehow isolate them out and do that or do I use the photoshop template and redo each page as a whole. That would seem labor intensive to have to keep inserting the hyperlinks on the menu items (why I like shared borders!). Speaking of hyperlinks - I keep seeing the question on how to make the text editable with hyperlinks.

I did see a tip somewhere where the person indicated that you take the photoshop file into Image Ready and optimize it - but aside from recognizing the names of the programs I'm not too sure what that means!

I would love some tips and how tos - but I'm even open to just pointing me in the right direction to find my answers - a book, a website. I'm a pretty good self learner - I just hate the feeling of shooting in the dark!

It just seems odd to me that there are all these template sites - a ton of people asking the same question - but searches have proved fruitless to actually uncover an instruction sheet!