its taken longer than i thought. mostly because i’ve found it hard customizing wordpress using php, which mostly i hven’t touched, just some cut and paste and entering my code around what was already there. but today i had a break through and have nearly figured ou tthe basic customizing i needed with css. I still need to find out about installing a forum. and then a small amount of javascript needs to go into the main template of the website, and then i can copy that for each of the sections and just change the content to suit. hopefully this second post will be enough to push the main page down enough so that the extra sidebar with links can fit on the page too. only problem is that stupid search form, i cant find where to reduce its width.