HTML/CSS Newbie

Wondering why my post went into Marketing section? I'm not offering any services yet. Just wanting to learn from as well as make friends with both newbies and experts alike. Oh well maybe I misunderstood the terms. Thanks jheg for your reply.

Another newbie member of what seems to be quite a popular site. Haven't read much thread from this site yet. I had been blogging on and off using wordpress for the past 2 years and I have gained some understanding on how seo plays a role in making your website found on google etc... I'm now interested and quite keen to become a web designer and had started reading about html, xhtml and css for the past few days. There seems to be quite a lot of information to take in. I would like to focus on creating sites using wordpress especially if it requires an ample lot of pages (as a cms). Or perhaps a simple html coded sites from scratch with a separate style.css for a simple "brochure" like sites. HTML/XHTML So far, I've learned about a, b, i, ul, li,, br /, h1,2,3,4,5 and other simple stuff. What are your learning styles in grasping such a mammoth of codes? You can always get the html codes when posting on Wordpress Blog and perhaps some free online xhtml editor of some sort? What about you guys? What other shortcuts do you use to so as not to type in those codes repetitively in order to speed up things? (I'm not lazy, just curious if you have other means in doing it) CSS I think this is where Im going to struggle a lot. I can't design/create images/background images myself but I have a taste of what a well designed website is. Do you normally buy it from online photo stocks? How would you fit different images on a page and make it resize and align where you want it to be? Is this where photoshop is needed? As I don't have one at the moment. Any great books to recommend? Or software worth investing in? Photoshop??? I hope I'm welcome in this community and hoping that you guys well not be so harsh on me when I ask some stupid questions in the future.