Updating the System plan and the world of CSS

Today has been spent working out a few bugs in my code and updating my system plan. There were a few things that I was unhappy with and I have changed those to better reflect the system that I have been building. This has been a good review exercise on what I originally aimed to do and what I have managed to accomplish. Time has not been my friend in this.
I think that if I had more of a background in this sort of thing my goals in my learning proposal would have been far more realistic. As it is, I have struggled to really learn enough about (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript to bring together what I have done so far. I seriously underestimated the time it would take for me to learn how to use these programs. This may not be the case for everyone; different strokes for different folks and all but it has certainly been the case for me. I find that I really need to try things out quite a lot before I can get them to work even with the helps of books such as Learning Web Design. This title has been a saviour however I have still been working through trial and error and unfortunately I still don't know why some things suddenly work. I have to backtrack to understand what it is I have done differently or corrected to make something suddenly appear as I want it to.
I am going to continue my trial and error learning style as I am making progress and I am definitely the type of learner that has to try things to understand how they work. Explanations are great and really help however it is the actual doing that is the key for me to retain the knowledge and gain the skills.