An associate and I have been given the task of applying a new theme to a preexisting live Magento site. It has been a huge hassle so far and here's the catch — we have no Magento experience! The company is no longer in contact with the previous developer that managed the first site launch. The experience so far has been daunting — to say the least...
I have downloaded a copy of the public_html folder from the client's FTP — as well as exported their entire database. From there deleted the local.xml file in app -> etc to initiate Magento's install wizard.
The database however, is an entirely different problem in itself. It's more than 1 GB, so when importing through local phpMyAdmin, it gets interrupted and asks to reupload to resume the process. At one point though it stops picking up where it leaves off — making it incomplete and unusable. So we've fallen back on using Magento's Madison Island sample data for now.
Given our nonexistent experience with Magento, are we just missing something? From what I've researched, Magento has a steep learning curve but I feel like we're making the process more complicated than it needs to be.
I realize I haven't gotten too in depth on specifics yet, I just want to make sure we're looking at this from the right perspective — especially given that our experience is mostly Wordpress-based. A lot of our process so far has been taken from online tutorials, articles, etc but with no luck yet.
Any insight would be much appreciated.