I will tell you my experience First, the basic rule to acquire any thing is "Necessity". Just create a situation that requires you to learn what you need. My necessity was created by DEBT. I was in grave debt and that help med to work hard. I first learned the basics of XHTML and CSS, then got some more tutorials like: http://www.w3schools.com http://www.subcide.com/tutorials/csslayout/index.aspx Then I was in a stage that you are in now. I cannot waste my knowledge, so I offered free service for simple designs, this gave me more experience. As I got more orders with different layouts I gained more experience and confidence to code any type of layouts. Later I got more paid offers so I was able to clear my debts For the last two weeks I started learning wordpress theme coding and I got orders for that. My price was nominal and my service is satisfactory for my customers, so I get regular orders now. This is not the end, I will start more CMS integrations soon... Here is an interesting fact: All this happened within 2-3 months. Now I earn in mid $$$ pm. I hope this will motivate you a bit. My strategy " Experiment, Experiment, Experiment..." Have a nice time
I can teach you. But in return you have to do some design for me. But I have to see the quality of your design work first. PM me some of your work links if you are interested.
The best way to learn is to jump in head first and do it. Yeah, it's frustrating at times, but it will make you a much more valuable designer once you have some coding skills under your belt. I used to feel like that about HTML and CSS. Totally sucked at it, didn't understand it, and I hated it. But I forced myself to learn it, and I can code pretty much anything by hand without much thought. Now, PHP on the other hand... I think I'm still in "hate it/don't understand it" mode.
Well, I can't design or code anymore due to me being in a car accident 2 days ago and my left arm is paralyzed, so I said screw it, I gotta learn something else instead.