Hi Phil,
I think you are confused about content manager. If you create content there you are not creating pages, you are just creating content instances that are not published on any pages.
Pages are just containers for content instances, pages correspond to menu items and may contain none, one, or more content instances.
You need to create pages in a hierarchy then publish the content instances on those pages to create things like our documentation section.
It is far easier and more natural to create the pages at the same time as you create the content rather than using the content manager.
Consider the page in this site documentation for Site Administration, that is a page that has no content instances on it it only has the show child pages site map enabled. If I want to make a new article below that page I first visit that page then I click the new page link and by default it will use the page you were on as the parent page. I create the page with a title that reflects the article I'm going to write and therefore the url also matches the article topic. Once the page is created I add an Html content feature to it with the same title and then I create the content of the article.
Since you've already createdthe articles as html content you need to create the pages corresponding to those articles in a hierarchy and then publish the articles on the corresponding pages.
Hope that helps,
Joe