How about sharing a link so we can understand your goals? If you want b2evo as a part of your web, meaning not the main page, then you put it in a folder and point your link to it. That's how I do it at http://wonderwinds.com - b2evo is in http://wonderwinds.com/blog with another installation in another folder.

To match the look of your web you will probably have to edit a php file and a css file whether you use skins or a template, or at least I think that's true. I always use skins so I don't really know about using templates. Either way, you will want to make the php file (either template or _main in your skin) use your current css file...assuming you do your web with css.

Adding your own smilies means editing another php file whether you use a template or a skin. Open up plugins/_smilies.conf.php and take a look. You upload your smilie then make a line that says the code you want it to be and what the file name is. It's an easy file to break! I don't know why that is - I just know that I broke it twice before I got my smilies to work.

Hope this helps you out a bit!

To be honest there isn't a great deal of difference between using skins and templates. For each skin to display, you need a stub file (or use the default that is included). With templates, they're just a skin with the stub file information included.

If you head over to my site, you'll see that all of the blogs except the photoblog use skins.

what if i just want the blog to display and not the calender and all those other thingamajigs. I want to include it in an iframe or a php include on mysite. What is the name of the main template file?

I suggest you do some searching, since these questions have already been answered on this forum.