I must launch an e-com site very quickly. I have permission to use an existing site and replace graphics and certain text with mine. However, the live site is currently ASP. I know nothing about ASP and my Unix web host does not support it. Should I attempt to convert it to PHP, about which I also know nothing, or start from scratch? I need help with this.

Frankly, the .asp pages look just like html to me, except certain links call other .asp pages for the searches and catalog pages.

The site is currently tables based and has about 40 pages and about 3000 items in the db, which I have just in Excel. I have all the data, all content and all the images ready to go. My next goal is to convert to CSS after the site is launched and producing income. I have the owner's permission to make these changes, because they are my vendor. I will use Paypal. My customers will buy from me and the product will be drop-shipped by the vendor. We both will need admin access to order info.

A link to the existing site will be provided privately to respondents interested in helping me with this project. I will need references of live e-com sites by interested coders. I will need to see estimated costs. In order to keep costs down, I am willing to do repetitive steps myself, such as copy/paste or the like.

I found an online tool that will convert ASP to PHP but it does some weird stuff. For example, it adds a semicolon at the end of every right arrow bracket. I'm a Dreamweaver user and I can easily globally delete the ; and the page looks ok, but I have no idea if it will work right, after the mysql db is attached.

I am a designer, new to e-com. Suggestions? Tools? Help?

Thanks!
Jack