where do I begin

Is there any written documentation how to customize the guestbook? I am really new to this and someone downloaded the stuff for me and told me to figure it!

I

Depends on what you mean by customise the guestbook. If you are talking about the look then thats all controlled via the templates (well mostly controlled via them) if you mean adding features then thats different. Read the second thread in this forum as it contains a lot of useful links.

that's what I want to do, I want to customize the look of my guestbook... I want to dress it up... here's a link to one that I saw http://www.lynnslilypad.net/guestbook/

They have a graphic with their name "Lynn's Lilypad Guestbook". It also appears that she has a link back to her website... how do you change the color of background and of the different comments area where people write their comments...

I am using FrontPage 2003, I am used to seeing in Preview mode what my page is going to look like... can I do that using this guestbook? I have a navigation bar on my website... can I add that to my guestbook...

When I look in the directory tree of FrontPage and click templates, I see a "gazillion" templates... which one do I work with?

thanks for your patience...

The customisation on that site is simple to achieve. I would advise against trying to customise the guestbook in Frontpage and use a text editor such as notepad or PS Pad to edit the templates. This of course requires some knowledge of HTML. If you look in the second sticky of this forum there is a link to changing the gustboks image/logo and in he same file (body.php) you should find where the top links are.