Customizing the Customer Portal

hey,

So I have a visualforce page built. My company would like to use the customer portal's tabs, however we don't want our users to see the left side content that is placed in there by default. Is there any way to customize this, remove it or remove elements of it?

For the unfamiliar, when you set showheader to true, it displays more than just the header in the customer portal. It also displays the search and 'create new' drop down, which we dont want to provide on every page in the customer portal.

Thanks