So playing round with SMF (simple machines forums) which is the platform this forum is based on, and there are lots of things i will forget,
index.template.php is where stuff gets defined, index.css defines what it will look like.
i realise how little coding i really know when i start playing with this stuff, its taken me days to get chat working, customise a bit of the SMF default curves theme to suit my tastes and it was probably 5 minutes for a decent code monkey!