Thanks for your quick reply. My hosting doesnt have php - but does support asp & asp.net. So I have to find a way to work with it.

Im happy to work it with placeholders - but is it possible? my index page would be index.htm, that's fine and will form the home page which anyone can view, beyond that I need just 1 page which only members can access - but the page which only members can access I'd like to create in WD - which means that this page would need to redirect back to the login page if accessed without entering the password first. I managed to achieve this using asp (thread above) but the problem was that logins (passwords) had to be pre-defined by me, the user couldn't create their own.

So I want to set up:
index.htm
page1.htm - with a login link redirecting to login.aspx
page2.htm
login.aspx - which allows users to create their own account - define their own username and password and on successful login redirects to page3.aspx
page3.aspx - password protected page but created in WD. Accessing page3.aspx via the url but without passing login.aspx first will redirect to login.aspx