[Group Imaging]

I am thinking about doing a pretty significant redesign of our current layout and I was wondering if someone who has had more experience with customizing sites might be able to weigh in on a couple of questions I had.

1) Ideally I would like to pull elements from traditional x-cart design and make them fit into a design I am working on. I attempted to try to strip down the home page on my test server yesterday but was having difficulty getting it to process correctly once elements were removed. Is there a list somewhere of required includes or other elements that have to be there in order for the cart to function at a base level?

2) Is there a way for me to build my site like a regular xhtml/css site and then drop x-cart elements into it (login, search, categories, etc.)?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Brad