Before you start

I have quite a few questions to ask you all.

I have already a dreamweaver-made website up and running. Now, I would like to convert it to Drupal to add more functionality. What shall I do if I want to replace this dreamweaver-made site with Drupal-made site with minimum service interupption. I would like to keep the content of most of this original site, the SEO and the ability for the user to keep accessing this site while a replacement site is being built.

I've got a question regarding the Drupal CMS.

This CMS works with totally user friendly themes, or themes that you can change parts of it. But you can't actually start from scratch with your own HTML and CSS etc... and add in some parts your CMS?

What if you already have a hardcoded existing webpage, where you have your own layout made by your own html, css, javascripts,... and you want some parts of that webpage to get managed separately by an external CMS.
For example a

Hello,
I just got Drupal installed and I'm looking for the right modules to incorporate to my site.

What I'm looking for is an Image/lightbox/Gallery modules where

*users can upload and post images as individual nodes which are promoted to front page
*images go to a gallery
*gallery has the 'next' and 'previous' options (like facebook gallery)
*each gallery image can have fivestar rating and comment functionality.

I suppose an easy way to put it is a commentable and ratable slideshow.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone, I apologise if my question has been answered elsewhere, but there is so much information, I'm afraid I get a bit lost. So I am asking for guidance on a workflow.
I have several domains on a unix server, running Cpanel. From my main domain I can access the other domains - sorry I don't know if this is what is referred to as shared domains. Assume main domain name is main and others as A, B, C etc.

Hello,
I need a tool to build an intranet.
I've been looking at various, bonita, alfresco, jbpm, joomla, open atrium, drupal ... or even raising the possibility of starting to do it from scratch.

I am looking to migrate out youth hockey program's site from google sites to drupal on a hosting plan. Here is a list of pages I want to set up:

Coaching background
Teams
---Team schedule
---Player profiles
Announcements
Photo Gallery
Contact Us

There will probably be more pages in the future, but this is a good start.

I started experimenting with Drupal but wanted to get the communities perspective on this.