adding zen cart to existing website

[ahyi81]

hi, i'm new to zen cart and i have an existing website.
i will like to keep the skin of my website yet add zen cart as a shopping cart function. will that be possible? thks!

[gjh42]

The short answer: no.

Zen Cart is built to *be* your website, not to take functions and stick them in another site. It is possible to skin it to match just about any design, and you can include HTML content pages in it.

Another possibility is to install Zen Cart in a subfolder of your site, skin it to look like your main site and have links back and forth. There are potential drawbacks, but many people successfully do this.

[kenny724]

I have a main corporate page that i'm working on...and I have a link to my store from www.midsouthcoin.com to midsouthcoin.com/midsouthcoinstore which is my zen cart.

[kenny724]

gjh42: what do you think the potential drawbacks are?

[gjh42]

Navigating between Zen Cart pages and external HTML pages endangers your ZC session. Anything in a (non-logged-in) customer's shopping cart will be lost if they stay away from ZC pages for 24 minutes (entirely possible if there is any amount of interesting content on the external pages).

You appear to have only home, about and contact pages in your main site, and all of that could easily be contained in ZC pages, as could future information pages you might want to develop.
You can style the ZC homepage differently from interior pages if you want a distinction there beyond content.