As I have seen a few others here with similar circumstances, it looks that this forum is a fairly open and helpful place for those willing to help themselves.
Like many others, I am a newbie not only to Zen Cart but shopping carts in general.
Also like many others, I am creating a site for a client and unfortunately had someone else working on the shopping cart end of things while I created the main site.
Following the pattern, I am now left holding the bag as the person that was handling the Zen Cart end of things is no longer able to complete the project.

With that said, here is what I have figured out so far:

1 Zen Cart is not an "ADD ON" function with some javascript that you add to a site that was created in some other app or coded by hand.

2 As I have created the main entry to the site in a somewhat standard way using Dreamweaver, my plan way to have the Zen Cart "portion" set up by this other party and then "merge" the two together.

3 I have read here that similar problems have been suggested that you "recreate" the mainsite in Zen Cart and go from there. I am not opposed to this, however don't want to "learn a new app" in order to get this done.

4 The client has already spent some time in adding inventory to their cart but are a long way from completing the thousands of pieces of inventory that they want to eventually end up with. Nothing has been launched as of yet, but could be at any time. The client's reason for building this site was mainly to enter into online sales, so an image site really wasn't much of a priority.

With the above information, I am looking for the answers to two questions for starters on this project.

Will my Dreamweaver experience help or hurt me in learning the design functionality of Zen Cart? I don't mind putting in some time on this as long as the learning curve is not huge. I am way more of a design individual and have basically no knowledge of coding or scripting which is why I hired out that aspect of the job in the first place. I do understand in my research here so far that it is a matter of building in CSS and using something called "sidebars".

My second question is: is this a place to find someone who can help with this project either for hire or trade of services that I can replace my previous subcontractor? If anyone is interested in this, you can contact me via private message. I am not willing to give out a url as it shows up in search results and not at all good for my client. The site hasn't launched yet anyhow so there is no point in that.

Any other suggestions would be welcome and once I figure out if this is salvageable, I will move forward or just start over with something else that will "merge" with what I have created in Dreamweaver.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this post as with this particular app, there really is no other place to turn.