I'd like to start coding a blog from beginning to end to fully learn the process. When I take a look at some of the free themes available on the net, I see that the stylesheets are very similar in terms of content. I understand that themes are similar in nature, but is there some kind of a default css stylesheet from which I should start customizing to meet my needs, or do I just start from scratch and code the entire thing?
You start with a layout, so you see how many columns you want then fill them in!! You can search Google for X column layout whereby X is the amount of columns you need. Or you can start from another theme and just edit that one.