New Zen Cart Template or Modify One of the In House Templates?

I've been struggling with how I can best achieve a layout similar to http://www.deandeluca.com

I have a few templates from template monster picked out... this would require me to make changes within their .psd formats and then upload into zen cart OR

I could use one of the well provided zen cart themes and modify the css to achieve this. I have created 3 zen cart websites with much assistance from this forum :yes:

I don't have coding skills per say but can make changes with assistance. Does anyone have expereience with both and could you make recommendations?

Much much appreciated, Lynn

If you're confident enough to make changes to a PSD file and then apply them to a Template Monster template, the same skills would allow them to be applied directly to your own custom template, sidestepping the hassle that comes from using TM's idiosyncratic markup.

Thanks Kuroi,

So if I understand you correctly... use one of the zen cart templates here

http://(sorry, site offline)/templates.html

and edit and modify via the stylesheet. This would be just as effective as TM's templates in achieving what I want with creating
a site similar to

https://www.deandeluca.com

Or did I misunderstand you?

Once again, thanks

That's not quite what I was saying. It was more an acknowledgement that TM templates often have very nice graphics but a rather idiosyncratic implementation of them into Zen Carts, that suggests that whoever designed the markup doesn't quite "get" Zen Cart.

So if you want to implement a TN template as is and not chance it, no problem. But if you're going to change it anyway, why not just implement the changes into a custom template that you build yourself.

Whether you build that by extending the templateDefault or by editing an existing template (which you might find at that site) will depend on your Zen Cart templating skill level, upon which I can't comment.

However, if you do go looking on that site, there are well and poorly implemented templates there too. Choose one you think might be a good base, but if it has lots of template files, then it's probably not a good place to start. Well-implemented templates will add only the files they need too and let the Zen Cart default files do the heavy lifting.