[pauldodman]

Most of the if statements already exist somewhere in X-Cart.

the customer/home_main.tpl template is a good place to look as it has statements for all kinds of scenarios.

e.g. what appears on the home page only - the welcome.tpl template.
Which following gbworld's good advice to use webmaster mode, you'd have discovered.

So you can see there is:

{elseif $main eq "catalog" and $current_category.category eq ""}
{include file="customer/main/welcome.tpl"}

From that you can then take the if statement.

So if you want something to show/be used on the home page only, you'd do:

{if $main eq "catalog" and $current_category.category eq ""}
HOME PAGE ONLY
{/if}

Hope that helps.