Yeah, I did finally manage to get it to work!
In the end it was so simple that I could kill myself cying.
It was done as I had originally thought, by adding another sidebar div to the php and css as I has originally.
What I had kept doing was modifying the index.php to try and add it thinking it was the primary page that wordpress calls when loading a site. This is NOT the case.
The heirachy of page calls in wordpress places index.php 4th in the order that it reads and that page.php is the primary homepage call and will fall back to index.php if there is no page.php, then something else.php found in the directory.
So if you need to do any modifications to your site div wise, page.php is where it should be done and not index.php
Thanks
