You have to understand how a template works. It sounds like you've written a webpage and turned it into a template. What makes a template in Dreamweaver work, is that you don't write an entire webpage. The only thing that you write into a Dreamweaver template is the XHTML that you want to appear on ALL webpages. Then each spot where you are going to have custom content on each page you insert an editable area. Usually as few as possible, one for the title in the doc head, one for a main content area, and if necessary, one or two others. Each one you add however, increases the complexity that you have to maintain as you go.
Once you have set up your editable areas, you can create a new file and choose the new template. Now each editable area allows you to insert content and the rest of the text is greyed out. That's defined by the template so it won't let you edit that at the page level, you have to go back to the template file itself. Also note that you can have multiple levels of templates. You can have one template with stuff that's on every page in the website. Then you have four other templates, each one based on the first template, yet customized for the items common to the four sections of the website. Then the individual webpages are based on the template for that particular section.
Dreamweaver CS5 Question
