What course did you sign up with?

Why not use Studiopress.com themes and modify them? They have a good step by step tutorials and a helpful community.

You're wasting your time if you're not satisfied with your current theme - just get a good theme or hire a wordpress consultant to set it up for you for $100 or so.

Skyler,

What do you want to know about WP?

Try out Flexibilty 3. It's free and highly customizable.

Asking for help in the Website Design sub-forum can be very helpful as well

Hi Wsckyler... I might be able to help for a very minimal price... Add me in skype so we can talk...

There are many free courses for WP you can search them. or try looking in wordpress codex.

I like Thesis, but if you're not too good with coding yet, I'd suggest going with ElegantThemes.

And of course it takes effort. All things in life take effort. If you're not willing to put the effort in, then you can't honestly expect anything positive to come out of it.

What are you trying to learn? There are gazillions of themes, both free and paid.

I've said this in another thread, if you're not satisfied with the look of your site you're probably using a theme that doesn't have a lot of options for customization. Have you looked at Suffusion, doesn't look that flash on the preview but once you've started using it and got the hang of it, you'll know what I mean.

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What specifically do you want to acheive, and whats your level of experiance.

Courses are all good and well, but there is SOOOOO much free information and resources available on wp that its probably not necessary.

Just read the documentation, tuts here: Main Page « WordPress Codex

Nothing beats the official site.

I am like you in the beginning, spend a lot of time tweaking the site. There are few disadvantages doing that. Eg: The site might not compatible to the new wp version. If you are not a designer dun try to do it own you own. Leave it to the pro.

Go check out themeforest(dot)net. There are a lot of professional and affordable theme you can choose from.

Someone suggested that you go to the Codex. My frustration with that is that whoever put it together seems to assume that you already know the basic things you want to look up. I find their forum a complete waste of time, too. I have had some luck just trying to narrow down what I want to learn and searching on Google. I can usually find articles on various "content farms" written by people who really want to communicate and actually remember what it was like not knowing how to do something in WP. I have also found useful videos in the same search(es).

I also recommend that you check out meetup.com and see if there are any WP discussion groups (or any number of other closely related groups) that might be helpful to join.