[pauldodman]

Firstly, don't be put off - once you get the hang of what does what, you can make x-cart fit your design.

Getting rid of things on the home.tpl page is only going to remove them from the rest of the site.

What you need to do is use if statements if you don't want them.

For example, if you don't want the location bar on the home page, but you do throughout the site, use this.

replace:

{include file="location.tpl"}

with:

{if $main eq "catalog" and $current_category.category eq ""}

{else}
{include file="location.tpl"}
{/if}

and just do the same with the other includes.