This maybe odd, but there are two areas of editing which seems to baffle the hell of out me. What is the best way to use lighting to an effective degree in a level and before you ask, I looked at the tutorials and I still did not get it. I thought how some of the community find ways of being effective with lights. As for elevators, I follow the tutorials, but it seems to not work. Yep, after four years JK editing still has elements I just cant seem to get right even when I try follow a tutorial. I just want to get it right

You have two options for lighting:
- static lighting
- dynamic lighting
Static lighting are the lights you place in JED. As JK uses vertex lighting, there has to be at least one vertex in the range of the light, or the light won't affect anything. Vertex lighting is a bit odd, because it follows the edges connecting the vertices of the level. This can sometimes look very ugly. Try to cleave a wall vertically in a box room and place the light in a corner...you will see that you can see the cleave, as one side of the (cleaved, yet still flat) wall will be brighter.
Dynamic lights are things with a light value in the template. There are predefined JK templates (light1.0 or something). Just place them near a vertex and they will spend light. The cool thing about them is, that they affect single surfaces of 3dos, rendering the ones facing the light bright, and the others dark. And you can move those lights, since they are things.

The elevator tutorial doesn't cover frame mode if I
remember correctly. Maybe you just don't have the
frames put in the right way. The only other
explanations I can think of are 1, you have the
values wrong in the placed cogs dialog or 2, you
are trying to make a cog do something it isn't
designed to do. In the second situation you would
want to find a different cog. It sometimes helps
you to understand how a cog is designed to work
when you read the notes and comments written
within the cog file themselves.

If this doesn't help, just make an elevator project,
trying to follow the tutorial. If you still can't get it
you could attatch a zip of your project, let us
look at it and see if there is something wrong with
it. If so we could tell you what needs to be fixed.
Elevators just take experience with using cog files.
If you understand that along with basic level designing
technique then you should be able to work nearly
any cog without too much explanation.

those little yellow dots are lights.

if you have a light hanging from the cieling, make about 6 little lights near the floor so it looks real. Complex archi works better with this lighting, cos its vertex lighting. more vertices usually = better.

And use dynamic lights also. ie, thingflags = 0x1 light = 0.5

You wont see it in JED, only ingame do dynamic lights show up.

Otherwise, use surface/sector extra light values, and maybe some texture lights (where a wall is lit on the texture for good effects)

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Thanks for the advice I'll try to follow and see if this can work, hopefully I will make my levels better.