I am working on designing an e-commerce site. I have lots of experience with webdesign both professional and personal. I have zero experience with ZenCart.

I have a book and have been going through it. I have read some of the stickies here.

Here is what I would like to accomplish:

I don't want ZenCart to control the images on the site, there will be no "new products" "Featured products" etc. About the only thing like that that we will use is Gift Vouchers, but that will be later on.

I have the entire site designed and laid out (it's not yet 100% completed though).

You can see it here:

www.connequestrian.com - the site is up for viewing, but none of the ZenCart stuff is yet in place.

Take a look at the Ladies Tab.

I will totally control the layout via html & css, I don't need ZenCart to do that for me.

What I need ZenCart for is this:

A customer will pick say a jacket. They will input a size & quantity and click "add to cart"

I want ZenCart to control the cart and checkout process. I also want zencart to sotre their information (like amazon does) for repeat customers. The info stored will be name, address, etc. There will be NO storing of CC info on the site whatsoever. The customer will have to re-enter their card # for each purpose.

I also want ZenCart to integrate with Authorize.net & CDGCommerce for the authorization of the CC transactions, etc. Zen cart will, once the CC has been approved, send emails to our distribution warehouse, and a few other key people.

At this point I am going through all of the configuration stuff and spending hours turning off columns, changing many values (like picture size, etc.) to 0.

Is this the right way to do it? It seems like I am spending most of my time to turn this stuff off. I want ZenCart to control the cart & CC transactions, but not the actual site layout. It seems to me that I must be doing this the LONG way. Myabe that's the only way to do it?

Right now I have a mirror of the website setup on my own personal server at home, and have ZenCart, MyPHPAdmin, etc. all installed on my server at home. My plan was to go through the whole configuration there, and get things close to where I want them. Then take the zencart php code for submitting form data (size quantity, color, etc.) from the product pages to the actual cart itself, and cutting and pasting that into the predefined HTML (the site, with a few exceptions, is not going to be a widely dynamic one, and product lines are very small and will only change about twice a year, at least initially). So the product pages will have a small snippet of ZenCart code to "send"/submit the size, quantity, product ID number (hidden form data) to the actual ZenCart shopping cart for order processing.

What's the best way to set this up? Am I doing this the long way, or am I proceeding slowly along in the best manner?

Curently on the real site the zencart files are in the website's root directory (zencart is not yet active). In my instance, would it be better for organization purposes to place the zencart stuff into a /store directory? I figure that way all of the main website stuff will be in the root, and when a customer places an item in their car, or views either their cart, or their account information they will be directed to a /;store subdir. My thinking is if ZenCart is controlling the whole site layout, etc. putting it in the root dir is a good idea, but when it's just being used for shopping cart, orderprocessing, and account information/retention it might be easier to organize by putting all of that in a /store directory.

Thanks for any help!!!!

Brain21