Converting to Drupal

I've been trying to transition to drupal from an old homebuilt cms setup for a few months. I have a friend working the database to migrate the user content over. The problem now however is the user area. This area has to do some things per user that is not setup in a standard drupal install.

If my site already has header/nav/sidebar of its own, can I use Drupal content just in the content area without redoing all of my site's page architecture?

Dear all,

I have a question which may seem rather bizare to the more frequent users of Drupal, but I am running into a bit of difficulty understanding how to fully utilise drupal.

The main problem I have had is that when I install the Drupal software on my server and load it up, the page looks like a blog. It makes me think that all I can do is make a blog and it's frustrating when I see that it is actually possible to make a website and I don't understand how.

My main question is: Can you all please provide me with some useful links to tutorials/documentation on exactly HOW I make my new drupal installation work like a proper website? What I want to be able to do is the following:

1) Have a variation of pages throughout the site. Most would follow a similar layout, but I need about 3-4 variatons
2) How do I set-up the page and create "zones". I know there is the block feature and I've looked through the .tpl (i think) files, so do I just have to edit those or what? I normally code my web-pages with css/html by hand to get the layout and then use php to fill in the spaces

I have a new Drupal site (which I like a lot -thanks for all the work everyone!)

I also have a disparate collection of existing content in various forms (all easily convertable to html) - an existing wiki, auto-generated help pages etc., which I would like to auto-upload into the site. Now, I know web services pretty well, and can do most things easily in the client end, but I am NOT a php expert, and would prefer to avoid messing with the drupal code where pssible.

I help run a college club and we recently migrated our website over to drupal but we still have admin/management tools that need to be migrated. One of our most important features is a membership list. Sure this could probably be handled by a google doc or accounts and roles but they rest the admins want a website solution. Is there anyway that I could integrate the old admin website into drupal authentication or do you know of any module that will take a University ID and first name/last name, membership year and store the list in a database.

I want to convert from modx to Drupal, so I'm pretty new to Drupal and I'm stuck on something that is pretty simple to do in modx, but I can't find the "Drupal-way".

I have this main menu:

Concept
|-- About
|-- Milestones

When the user clicks on "Concept", the page is redirected immediately to the "About" page. In modx this is done by placing a [[FirstChildRedirect]] snippet call in the "Concept" page. There is no content for "Concept", it's just a container for the "About" and "Milestones" pages.