Customizing nopCommerce

Hi,
  
We are a small team are are new to nopCommerce. We are developing an nopCommerce based application. Our client facing web site's Login/forgot password/Register and other pages need to be heavily customized. For eg - our login page needs to be minimalistic and would need only an email id, password entry fields and a Login button.
  
Could you point me to best practices for achieving the above objective ?
  
Do I modify the corresponding pages found in \Presentation\Nop.Web\Views\Customer\ & controllers in \Presentation\Nop.Web\Controllers\
  
Or
  
Is there a better way of doing this and organizing all the modified files in one place/folder so that upgrading to future versions of nopCommerce will not be difficult ?

The requirement is to ensure that all the changes made to the project(views/controllers etc) are in one folder so that they are not overwritten when we upgrade to a newer version of nopCommerce.
  
I read somewhere that you can copy stuff you need to change (Login.chtml, CustomerController) to Themes/DefaultClean and then make your changes in this folder. I dont remember where i read it.

I feel doing so will make it that much easier to maintain our codebase because all your custom code is in one place/folder/sub folders

Is this a best practise? And is there a disadvantage to this method of doing things.?

Best Regards,
Kyle

Yes you can do these things.
Using new Project directories within the code like you have suggested is one way
Using Plugins is another one way to keep code changes together and allow for easy or not so easy updates

All the standard Philosophies for working in a team and modifying project code using Visual Studio or the other tools that can be used apply

Also see https://docs.nopcommerce.com/en/developer/index.html

Here are a few links I found searching the forum (there will be many more items if you search for modification of specific elements)

https://www.nopcommerce.com/en/boards/topic/89877/altering-nopcommerce-code
https://www.nopcommerce.com/en/boards/topic/91087/development-best-practices-for-modifying-nopcommerce-code

Thank you so much Sir for your reply.

The links that you have included in your response are super useful.

Thanks once again!
Kyle