Publishing sites use publishing pages to display information to the users. Publishing pages are based upon underlying page layouts which essentially tell the page how to layout the information out on the page. Page layouts, in turn, are based upon content types and content types can have several site columns associated with it. This video goes into detail as to exactly why you would want to create these components and shows you how each one is created step by step.

Branding a page to look like the rest of the site is easy to do with SharePoint Designer. If you have a page that you created from scratch or in which you copied the content from a different site or from a document, you can easily provide that page the matching look and feel for the rest of the site by attaching the Master Page of that site to it.

The Master Page for a site provides the chrome for it. The quick launch navigation, site banner, logos, and the top link bar are all part of the master page. This video shows how you can use SharePoint Designer to easily switch to any of the existing master pages on the site. The example used here is how you can switch to the default.master master page to give your site the look and feel of a SharePoint 2007 site.