PHP, CSS, and other acronyms

I’m in a weird sort of halfway place when it comes to designing and coding web sites. I think I have a fairly good handle on how to layout and visualize what a page can and should look like, but I basically lack the technical know-how to get it put together.

Customizing the way pages look — here and at Flicker — has been a matter of starting with other people’s code and pulling it to bits. More often than not, I simply go in and change values until I figure out which is the property I’m trying to change.

This method has, about a year after I started, given me just enough knowledge with how PHP and CSS work to be very very frustrated.

A lot of the time there are things that I would like to do but can’t figure out how, because it’s not the type of thing there would normally be a tutorial on.

How to make boxes with rounded edges in CSS? Probably easy to find. How to extend a CSS element beyond the border of the stylesheet? Seems to be damn near impossible.

I suppose at some point I should give up and start taking classes or reading books.