Newbie question

[Fenris]

I'm currently playing the demo, and I ran into one small problem:

I can create colonies in my home system without problems. But whenever I send a colony ship through a warp point, my colonies won't start. I go to a planet with a red or green asterisk above it, click on the 'colonize' button, and the colony is created. But the population is '0' and whenever I try to build somethning there, it never gets done.

Now I know I'm missing something obvious that everyone else knows, and I hate to use forums to ask rookie questions like this 'cause I know I'll get flamed back to the stone age. But I'm trying very hard to get excited about this game, and I can't get too far into it without some help here.

Thanks.