Newbie help really needed please

[twistingwidget]

Hi
Sorry if I'm asking the most obvious questions, but I am very very new to website building and forums etc., the terminology is staggering!........anyway my question is.....I have a website www.esstestsandtrials.co.uk and I have just added a forum via Nabble as suggested by the moonfruit guys, I'm really pleased but it looks a bit "flat", how do I make it look more inviting, a bit more professional/fun even?, I added the page to my website so you can see what I mean, if someone can give me some advice etc. ( in layman's terms please) I would really appreciate it.
Kind Regards and thank you

[GregChapman]

Login to your forum, then go to:

Options > Application > Change Appearance

This will add a black "Editing Toolbar" to your forum, with a number of buttons on it. Explore the various options you find there.

Note that every dialogue on the Editing Toolbar has a "Restore Defaults" button, so you can always get back to where you are now, so be bold in your experiments!

Come back and ask some more specific questions if you can't work out how to achieve what you want.

[twistingwidget]

Hi
Sorry it has taken me this long to reply to you, thank you for your help.........I do have a question ..what is CSS?, and how do i manage/manipulate it?
Thanks

[GregChapman]

Hi,

twistingwidget wrote

what is CSS?, and how do i manage/manipulate it?

Along with HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), the main coding language that controls the structure of a web page. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the language that controls appearance of a site.

HTML will define which text is a heading or paragraph and the location of an image file to be displayed on the page.

A CSS file will describe how any heading or paragraph appears - it's colour, font, size, margins, alignment, etc.

You need to write the appropriate CSS code if you wish to control more esoteric aspects of the appearance of your forum. most of the simple things are done through the various options on the Nabble interface.