I'm wondering how people go about defining layouts of their various pages within a site when you go to add a new page. I thought I'd be able to define various layouts which I could choose from. Rather like a template in Dreamweaver.

What I mean is - say I have 12 pages with a very similiar theme/layout that I would like to populate with content. Can I define a template with, for example a body of text with four images underneath, that can be selected by the user and the text and images be filled on a page by page basis.
Do people just do a html template and paste it into each new page or what.

I have been struggling to just align images in a block of 4 and wondered how people do this.
similiar to this www.hotknife.co.uk

You can create custom page templates http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread.php?t=711 and post templates http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread.php?t=758

To display things side by side I recommend tables, hotknife.co.uk used tables, too

Thanks, especially for the quick response. I did see those threads and create a different template. There was an example with 6 cells across the top which I followed. But maybe I'm getting confused on their usage.
Once you've created the template you then can't edit it or change the content with the WYSIWYG when you add a new page as you can't get to the HTML of it.

The way I'm working at the moment is to just cut and paste a basic table layout I copied from elsewhere into the HTML part of the editor and fill that table with content. This seems a little long winded to me and was wondering if there was a way of selecting a premade layout for the page. I've very new to this by the way so forgive me if I'm completely misunderstanding.

That's the point of a CMS, to have pre-made layouts and only fill in the content for each post or page. So you don't have to copy the layout each time for every new page you create. It seems you want to edit both the layout and the content at the same time and in the same place (the Wordpress editor), for every or many pages or posts.

The layout is indeed separated from the content, and you cannot edit the layout in the Wordpress editor.

But it would be very uncommon to change the layout for every other page. You'd usually have 1 or a handful of different layouts for a single web site. I am not sure if you understood the page template method. You can create many different page templates and they will be available when you create or edit a post or page. You create a post or page and then apply one of your existing page templates to this post or page.

Also, for a better understanding:
"Post": date based entry, organized in categories and with tags
"Page": static entry, organized in Pages and Sub Pages, resembling traditional web sites

Ok. I think things are getting clearer.
the site i am working on is.
www.hotknife2.co.uk
under the services section I have a number of pages that have a block of text and four images. At present my work method is to add a new page and then, into the WYSIWYG editor, paste a layout table into which I insert the different images and alter the text as required. From what I inderstand I should be able to create this as a template and then edit the content accordingly. I created a template called six cells which is on the 'test' page of the site. But I can't edit what goes into the content of the cells at the top via the page editor because it doesn't show in the editor, should I be able too. I shall go back and check I've not done anything wrong but it does show in the template dropdown. Sorry for being daft - if you asked me about 3D i could bore you stupid but the web leaves me feeling dumb.

Understood. If you added something like that six-cell area from this thread http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread.php?t=880

then those six areas would not appear in your Wordpress editor. You don't get 6 additional areas where you can place content through the WP editor. Those 6 areas would be hard coded into the layout. Whatever you put there would appear on all pages or posts.

One way to get several additional and empty content area that you can fill individually for every post or page through the WP editor, would be "custom fields".

But I'd suggest that you start with the basic usage before going into advanced details.

Paste a table into the Wordpress editor and place your various bits of content into those table cells. Seems you were doing that anyway.

Morning, okay thats fine. Yes that is what I'm doing - thanks for the clarify. Thought I was missing something.