Question : Should I make a Drupal Theme from scratch?

I need some advice please:
 I already built a website using html and css, but now I want to integrate it to a cms like Drupal.
I was looking at some Drupal tutorials and they recommend to use a basic theme and modify it to get what I want. I am not sure if I should do that since I expend many hours building my site using my own markup. so, my question is, should I take a theme (like Zen) and modify it to meet my needs instead of using the one I already built from scratch.

I have an advance knowledge of css and html and an intermediate knowledge of php, but people is telling me to not reinvent the wheel making my own theme from scratch, what do you thing Experts?

Thanks in advance,

Winter

Answer : Should I make a Drupal Theme from scratch?

I highly, highly recommend using the Zen starter theme. It's blank (as far as most of the design is concerned) but it has a lot of documentation, and a lot of the CSS styles pre-defined for you so you don't have to hunt them down.

Drupal can be a little frustrating when you have to hunt down that one CSS selector that is included in core that you can't seem to override for some reason. Zen has them all pre-listed.

It also has all of the hooks you need in order to "graduate" to higher-level theming, with superb, full documentation.

It has saved me countless hours of work...even when starting a theme from absolute scratch (e.g. a Photoshop template or a pre-designed XHTML/CSS site).

Good luck, and do come back and post any questions you might have!

Mike