modifying the original theme

[nimmy]

So I wanted to build something from scratch that resembles what my partner was doing for a site we're developing. It's a very small project and we have some experience with Web Design (i.e. CSS, and so on) but never with E-Commerce solutions such as Prestashop.

What I did was copy over the default theme and rename it. I then made a 2nd css file with our own design rules in my theme/css folder and edited the header.php in order to be able to access it. I started editing Header.tpl and Footer.tpl and thought it would be simple enough for me to only add the hooks (i.e. {!hook_top} and so on) to the divs we had already made as part of our layout, however it seems to do nothing. When I access the front end it is just blank. Is there something I am missing? Please help out, and thanks.

[nimmy]

I'm not sure if this is required, but our divs (the ones we created) are named differently as the ones in the global.css. Obviously we're using those. Do the names have to match in order for the hooks to function? Could that be causing the front end to be completely blank?