I'm not sure what would cause this problem but ispconfig is reading out of the default www directory and not the one allocated to the website. it's reading out of apache2-default for the index I'm using debian etch under the perfect setup from falko
fixed the problem, vhosts was empty so i renamed the latest timestamp and unfortunately there was a syntax error in a directory statement why would that occur? of course it was an easy fix by just adding a closing >