Hacking Please help me

[Rammoth]

I finally took the step into hacking, but after reading numerous tutorials on how to do it, to make sure I do it right, I'm completely lost due to excessive information or something.

What I have:
- EU-wii with Wiikey
- Firmware 3.1 (never been upgraded)
- Homebrew channel with the use of Bannerbomb

What I want:
- Acces to the shopping channel
- Getting rid of #002 since I get black screens with all the newer games such as Madworld and Punch-Out
- Possibly some sort of backup launcher which would work better than my modchip, so that if the games won't run using the normal method, I have a back-up loader
- Be able to still use my freeloader

From what I could gather Wii CIOS REV 13B should solve all my problems (tell me if I'm incorrect), so I downloaded it, but there was only a .dol in there. Should I rename that to boot.dol and put it in it's own map in the apps folder and then run it? On the youtube tutorial it looked all fancy with a Sonic logo, but when I put it on there it just shows the name I gave it with no author listed or whatsoever. Where am I going wrong? Do I need to take steps before I can actually install that? Something like WAD manager/installer etc?

And then there was something about cIos 249, but I can't seem to find any good information on that.
I know I'm a noob and all, but please help me. This is driving me nuts!
Any help is VERY much appreciated.

*EDIT: Oh crap, in my frustrations I opened up a topic, while there's a sticky made for noobs like me. I'll post it in there and a mod can delete this topic if you want.

 

[FenrirWolf]

The fancy sonic logo thing is an icon.png and the text comes from a meta.xml file. If you don't have one of those then apps just appear as a blank white something in the HBC. Nothing to worry about, it runs just fine.

Then once you've got the cIOS installed you can do an update to 4.0 and that'll kill the 002 error since it's the result of your Wii missing some newer IOS's. If you really want to you could install these IOS's manually, but there's not much reason to avoid updating. Also, cIOS Rev13 or any other rev is the same as cIOS249.

Finally, you don't need Freeloader. Use GeckoOS for region free gaming on any firmware.

Finally, your modchip works better than the homebrew disc loaders, but the USB Loader performs better than your chip does, with the exception of some incompatible games. I'd look into that.