New to WP how to skin

Hi, I am very new at this wordpress blog thing.

I have it just locally on my machine to test before I unleash it to the public.

I have a website locally and i have templates for the site but I want to use one of the templates to keep it uniformly the same.

I would like to be able to keep the exact look and feel of this template, but have this template as the WP theme.

I have only just installed WP over the weekend there, so i am very very new to this.

is there any extremely simple steps to follow to keep my HTML template and integrate it with WP.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have been around the codex and kind of followed all the links and got really lost.

plus googling it does not come up with anything much better, it always brings me to the codex.

ik