Converting to Drupal

Hi,

I am new to drupal and been working on a website. The design is complete and being converted to html. I was looking for a cms when i came across drupal.

Is there anyone who can perhaps assist in making a custom theme for my site ? How easy is to make a drupal theme ?

For the site, i have the following

I went through the modules but am unable to find what I am looking for. I am sure it exists.
What I want is to place a piece of text in the left column but it should only show up on the frontpage (a welcome notice). Just to be clear: I do *not* want it in the content area and *not* on any other page but the frontpage..

OK, I've volunteered to run our boy scout troop's web site. what we have now is hand-written HTML, and it's pretty featureless. I'd like to move to Drupal, and have individual logins for scouts and parents to read private data (and perhaps post on a forum), as well as several classes of users that could edit portions of the site, as well as of course an administrator class of user. Sign up has to be by invitation only, and I need fairly strong security, as things like phone numbers and addresses would be on the site.

Hi there

I am looking to use Drupal, but my website already has links and Page Rank and I need to keep my URLS the same. For example, www.mydomainname/mypage.php needs to be kept the same. Is it possible to do this with CLean URL or any of the other pluggins?

Also, will there be duplicate content issues with this?

Many thanks in advance

Rachael

I am not sure if this has been answered somewhere already, but I was unable to find it.

I am looking to make a switch to Drupal, I am currently using a CMS that was developed internally. The system works, but is not efficent nor up-to-date. So I am looking for better alternatives.

I'm setting up Drupal to work as the static content for a shopping cart system and I want to have individual books act as the content holds for categories like "Help" which will have a couple of dozen pages below it. I want the breadcrumb to show, but I don't want to users to be able to access "home" because it's not going to be used....

Thanks!