Magento

Still deciding whether or not to go with Magento - can you tell me (may not be as easy as an answer that I am looking for) whether or not it will be hard to use Magento with a website that is already designed?  I have a site that is basically just a gallery and would like to upgrade it to e-commerce with shopping cart, etc.  My site address is http://www.belkaidesigns.com

Am I looking at having to re-do it completely?

That’s doable in magento, some things would obviously not be 100% the same, but close enough and most likely a lot nicer.

In all honesty, you should prolly get someone to design you a site, then go from there.

There isn’t a “port it over” for magento, it’s more of a manipulation of CSS and XML schema more than anything I’ve found so far.

It would be a complete recode through aye if that’s what you are getting at.

I would definitely say that one would be pretty easy to do in Magento. First off, just based on what you currently have, you have two top level categories, that when clicked have, display a list of products in a grid fashion. You also have the standard nav items for a site in the top nav, such as home, about, info, etc...Also, you have pre-existing artwork, logo and backgrounds that look in my opinion quite nice and appropriate for the nature and style of the site. Honestly, to add shopping cart functionality and “transition” your current site over to a magento platform, keeping the original appearance, would be a cinch.