Can I just link to pages for each product?

[jollygreen]

After uploading my custom templates and publishing, I realized that I had completely misunderstood what the page and product templates are for. This was my first time seeing the result...

http://207.56.152.89/store/index.html

This occurred only after I assigned one of the product to the main page template. I was only doing that as an experiment. I had essentially created a main page template and a product template that is the entire html page for each product. Oops.

So, that link above shows the page layout that I want for both the index page AND the individual product pages (the one overlaying the navigation part of the index page). The navigation that you see on the right side of that overlaying page is the same navigation that it is covering on the main index page.

My question is this...

Can I just have a hard coded html page that I have created and have all of the thumbnail icons link dynamically to corresponding product pages?

I'm rereading the cookbook now to see if I can understand what they really meant. Since I'm being particular about subdividing the products in the navigation under 3 different headings and possibly changing those subdivisions in the future, I get the impression that I should do the index page myself rather than create it as a template, right? If that's true, I just need to know how to link to pages that are created for each of the products, right?

Thanks.
--boB