put the forum in a new folder, call it forums or forum or something, then make the welcome page in the base directory called index.php

you can gather whether a person is logged in using the sessions data, and including sessions.php in the welcome page.

hence http://www.vagweb.co.uk can tell if your logged in and give you access to the brochure downloads etc if you are

You may just be able to rename index - not sure what that will break.

Leave everything in the same folder though so you can use the cookies set for the board on other pages.

Without having access to the server it's hosted on, the easiest way to do it would be to make index.php your welcome page.

Or if the index.php hasn't got the forum on it, just put a redirect to welcome.php but i'm guessing at the moment that index.php holds your forum.

If you don't want to change the files, just create a folder on the domain, so that index.php is your welcome page and forum/index.php is your forum.

i want to add a welcome page to my forum, so i want it to direct to something like welcome.php instead of index.php when i go to my domain. any ideas?