I'm looking to make my UBB forums look a little more web pagey (if that makes sense to anyone :P)

Heres a good example of what i'd like to do:

http://www.black-sabbath.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm

The sidebar and images are really the sort of thing i want to do.

Could anyone give me a quick break down of what i need to know to do this, and possibly direct me to some good tutorials?

I suspect i'm going to need to know a little html or css?

hmm, come to think of it, i have a feeling his site is actually all HTML, and he has the forums inserted into that? True? False?

Yes, the top and left are an insert using tables (check out CP -> Display Options -> General -> HTML Includes Tab)

So, it would be possible to build something like that using, say, dreamweaver and a graphic design program like Gimp or photoshop?

Another question is, I have a portal page which is linked to my news forum. Any post i make in the news forum gets displayed on the news page... etc... Is there any way for me to set like a front page?

What i'd like to do is have a static introduction, sort of like a home page that doesn't get updated via the news forum.

So, picture you go to my forum.

The first thing you see is "Welcome to bla bla bla bla bla bla bla," I'd like that all the be static then have a "portal" or "news" link that bring you to what is currently the front page (the portal page).

I know I can set a static box on top or below of the displayed stuff from my news forum, but i'd like them to be different pages. Is that at all possible?

That all probably seems confusing as hell, so if you don't understand what i'm getting at let me know and i'll try to clarify.

But, again, if theres a good user guide or tutorials on customising UBB forums, i'll gladly research this all myself, but i can't seem to find anything like that.

1. yes, you can use a program to generate a table and customize the inserts to display the content.

2. The portal has a news system itself that you can use that works rather well; there are however items at UBBDev that allows you to use forums to generate news (see my UGN Security site in my signature for ane xample of forum content populating an external page).

anywhere i can read about the portal news system?

Currently what i'm doing is: I have a forum called "news" that i have chosen to display posts from on the portal page, which seems to work pretty well in terms of displaying news, but what i'd like to do is have a page BEFORE the portal page for more static information that wont be updated often, without using an external site.

I'd like to stick with UBB exclusively. You're a huge help, btw. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

Here we go... UBBcentral.com... Was your guys' front page made through the forums with inserts/etc? Or is that a purely css/html site with a link to your forums?

If it's the prior, how would i do that? Or where could i read about how to do that?

OK, thinking about it, that was a terrible question because ubbcentral.com is obviously not part of the forums.

Heres a better question. Is there any way to setup a SECOND portal page?

I think i found a way to do what i'm looking to do. thanks for all the help

no prob

Well, make sure you tell us what you did.