I am working with a church to build a new web site. Their current site is rather tired looking and needs a real re-do. They hired a web designer to design the new site look and feel. They also agreed that a CMS approach was a good thing to do. We settled on Drupal. Now that they have approved the designer's concept, what does it take to make that design be the web site design of a Drupal based site? I am 95% of the way there, and it was not as tough as I feared it might be. I was able to look at the Zen theme as an example, and used the information in chapter 8, The Theme System, from the excellent new book, Pro Drupal Development, to see how to convert a design into a new theme. You can see the current state of things at http://fumc.dreamhosters.com One thing that I learned from the book was that the creation of a front page as different from the other pages only required a file page-front.tpl.php. Then this page format is used as the front page. I followed the advice on how to put Drupal content variables into the design, and it worked! I had some serious tweaking of the CSS file, as well as a combination of the designer's CSS file and the Zen CSS file to make the Drupal content variables appear reasonably formatted. I chose to hard code the top menu for now as it was all graphics based and I haven't learned yet how to best do that in Drupal. (The ImageMenu module may do what I need.) But that's really about it. The side menu worked pretty much as I hoped it would, and the content is inserted where I expected. Now it's on to learning the best way to do other content types, like photo albums and calendars. There is no clear choice here. I also found a bug in the Image content type when used with multi-sites, which is what I had hoped to do to test my site. Until that is fixed, if I use Image, I will need to test on a local computer in the "default" site. I am learning that learning about the many Drupal modules and how to best get them to work for you is a challenge. There are many ways to get a task done, and some real rough spots in most modules.