Jekyll websites aren't loading templates correctly

Question

I cannot use Jekyll correctly; for any post, if I try to view my site in the browser, I only see Markdown. The generated HTML is only from the Markdown, meaning that the templates (from the _layouts) folder aren't working correctly. Can somebody point out the issue that's causing this to not work?

Here are the files I'm working with:

• My Base layout file for Jekyll
• My Post layout file for Jekyll
• I'm using the default Jekyll post (the one that comes out of the box)
• I haven't touched my _config YAML file.

I'm working on a Win 8.1 machine with Ruby 1.9.3 and Jekyll 1.4.2. I appreciate any help you guys can provide; I just really hope I can use this tool, it seems perfect for my needs.

Edit: Here's some more information about my set-up:

My base layout file (the one that contains the HTML head and parts of the body) is default.html. My folder scheme is the same as the one shown in the documentation. The site was made from the one auto created when the command jekyll new ____ is issued.

Oh, and here's the front matter:

From the post:

    ---
    layout: post
    title:  "Welcome to Jekyll!"
    date:   2014-03-13 20:22:46
    categories: jekyll update
    ---

From the post.html template:

     ---
     layout: default
     ---

From the default.html template:

     ---
     ---