How to Split content in drupal 7?

Question

I am new to drupal and drupal 7, I saw a video tutorial previous day regarding drupal 6, there they just used this:

print $content;
print $title;

to display post title and content separately however, in drupal 7 , I copied one of theme page.tpl.php file and there is only this:

 <?php print render($page['content']); ?> 

This shows full content inlcuding everything, how do I split them into parts like:

I want to customize my template like this

<div id="leftHolder">

                        <h1>Welcome to My site // for header </h1>

                        <p>

                            Some text Portion // 

                        </p>

 </div> 

This should be same for individual page and front page that shows 2 or 3 posts.

I tried making custom node.tpl.php file too, should I add some special function call to make it able to load content from node.tpl.php file ?

I pasted this code in template to render from page.tpl.php file of my theme

function connect_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
if (isset($vars['node']->type)) {
    $nodetype = $vars['node']->type;
    $vars['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__' . $nodetype;
}
}

Answer 1

In page.tpl.php leave where ever you wants: <?php print render($page['content']); ?> and then use node--YOUR_NODE_TYPE.tpl.php and put content where ever you want. You habe $node object print it and see what variables it has. Make sure that you also have node.tpl.php - initial template file in your theme folder.