I am starting to feel a little defeated in trying to setup a Carter Lake.

WD has built in support for the original “carter lake” style web site
(like my one is)
you can use the build in setup…see under control panel, web files/web page setup…first tab…scroll down…to see the setup…if you have ticked to use Carterlake
or
edit the template file
mywebpagetemplate.txt
in the webfiles folder
directly