BuddyPress.org

Hi, I’m really anxious about where to begin building my bp site. I have a wordpress site, it shows videos and basically has a few customized pages. I want to add BP component, and make the front page just like my wordpress-only site, but with some buddypress widgets. However, for the buddypress section I’m OK with using buddpress default style. So, what approach should I go to make this site? Like, should I start with BP template, and just swap in my own index.php for the BP’s index.php, would that make the front page like my old? kinda confused how to approach this, thanks any help would be appreciated. BTW I use thematic.