That was incredibly be helpful. I will work my way through this stuff for sure and hopefully all works well. I'm sure I'll stumble and fall a bit... but that's part of the learning process. I'm in between a rock and a hard place. I want to focus on productivity (build a good website, quickly), but don't want to skimp on fundamentals and get lost in all either. I'll to try my best to find the balance, but knowing me I'll likely take the slower route and learn all I can... hopefully it ends up being the better choice.
Anyway, I guess it's time to dive into the front-end a bit more. In regards to photoshop, is splicing the accepted way to design html/css? Or do designers ever go straight to the code?
And I think going the jQuery route will be more effective. I'm sure you'd learn javascript by default when learning the jQuery framework anyhow.
And then there is the back-end. Which I will tackle after the above. Although, one question on that... as I only know limited PHP (and mySQL), I'm open to learning something different (Python/Django, Ruby/Rails), what are the reasons to choose one over another?
Anyway, I'll take this all one step at a time.
Thanks again!