Converting to Drupal

I have just taken over my local football club's website. Its all static html unfortunately. I have convinced the committee that it needs to move to a more dynamic site that will allow everyone to participate and I'm going to use drupal for that.

Hello everyone,

I have imported an exisiting site into Drupal sometime back and can't seem to go forward after that. I want to retain the existing site structures.

For example the existing site looks like this:

Category 1 - this is static page which has some content plus links to sub pages below.
- sub page 1
- sub page 2

Category 2
- sub page 1
- sub page 2

............etc

Hello,

Is there a way to choose different block-to-region assignments per node. For example, if I go to Adminster > Site Building > Blocks, then I will be able to select which blocks I want in which region. But this seems to apply globally to all pages.

I actually want different nodes to have different assignments. For example:

node/1 has the "left-sidebar" region with login, calendar, and notebook modules.
node/2 has the "left-sidebar" region with most recent posts, and who's online modules.

How can I do this in Drupal?

I'm trying to convert the stored blog entries in my personal blog to that of nodes in drupal. I store my dates as datetime timestamp (YYYYMMDD HH:MM:SS AM/PM) to whatever drupal uses. Unfortunately, I can't figure out what drupal uses. Is it doing date/time from the epoch? Is there an easy way for me to translate from my dates to drupal dates so I can keep my dates?

To get my stories inserted as proper nodes do I only need to insert in the node and node_revisions table?

I am new to Drupal, but have been a web developer for many years. I want to switch to Drupal because I want to use a consistent CMS for the websites I develop. Drupal certainly looks like it should fill the bill, but I'm having difficulty understanding the way it works. The basic tutorials are fine and I have the two Apress books: "Building Online Communities with Drupal ..." and "Pro Drupal Development". I'm missing that "ah-ha" moment of understanding. I look at nodes, stories, pages, etc. and am having trouble getting them to all link together cohesively in my mind.