Welcome to the forum!

The simplest way is to edit any existing skin, and remove all blocks that you don't need.

I tried that, and I start getting parsing errors the moment I try using the skin. The one thing I seem to have the hardest time figuring out is background and font color, I don't see where to set those in the skin.

Like I said I'm using 3.3.3-stable and the on-line manual is for an older version and even though I find the sections being referred to the formatting and php code is very different. Its just a bit frustrating for me I want the background color to be #151616 and the font color #48483B to match the website. The skin file I really need to modify is a_noskin.php but when I cut sections I don't want I get the parsing errors. Here is website I'm working on www.vfw-post-9761.org

Okay I figured out the script (somewhat) for a_noskin.php and got rid of most of the elements. It currently looks like this http://dl.dropbox.com/u/359039/blog-window.png

Here is my current version of a_noskin.php http://dl.dropbox.com/u/359039/a_noskin.php

If I'm reading the file correctly I need to modify rsc/css/fp02.css to get the colors I want for the background and font, is that correct?

Do I need to also use that css file to set width of the blog posts?

Finally what element puts the blue box with the word "News" at the top as I don't want that either?

ok it is very nice try