Essentially, I’d recommend doing two things.

1. Modify as little of the existing Magento XHTML as possible (copy the files from the ‘default’ theme as a starting point).
2. Work with the concept of creating “areas” (left, right, content, etc) and style the various boxes (widgets, referred to in the XHTML/CSS as boxes) without modifying the XHTML. This will save you time in the future and also ensure that you don’t have to dive into endless *.phtml files to change code.

I hope this helps. Let me know if anything is unclear or if there’s anything else I can assist with.

Cheers,
Matty.

I’ll hopefully be working on part 4 over the next few days and will post it as soon as possible.

Are there any topics in particular which you would like covered?

I usually start as I would when building a website for any other CMS, which is by building the static XHTML/CSS first. From there, I setup my code within either a custom interface (with a copy of the default theme in it) or in the default interface and I begin slowly migrating my code over to Magento. From there, because I have the default theme in place, all templates and layout XML files can be easily found from the default theme. From there, I slowly customise any templates for any modules that require specific customisation. Once I’m done with that, I copy and paste the unmodified templates and layout XML files from the default theme into my custom theme.

At this point it’s probably a good idea that I mention that its a very good idea to keep a note of all files you modify in the template and layout folders… so you don’t overwrite your customisations by accident.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Matt.

Do you start with the blank, default or from scratch when developing a new site?

Patiently waiting for part 04

Are there any areas in particular which you would like me to discuss in Part 04?

Kind regards,
Matty.