Thanks for the link joe2812 - duly bookmarked for a revisit.
And thanks for the info Windle Poons - in the end I went for Adobe's classroom in a book for PS 7 - looked like the kind of thing for me, a snip at £33

, but got to start somewhere.
I'm not intending to use PS for web design - quite happy with DW MX - though I may change my mind as I go along. By the way, did you create your fira-design site with PS? Looks pretty cool and I like your philosophy - pretty much the same as mine - a customer once asked me what it was and I said "well the bottom line is - not to take the p..s" (in terms of my charges) and that has worked very well in the last 4 years on my own.
In passing I should mention that I have a copy of Paint Shop Pro 7 which does pretty much the same as PS but it kept crashing despite a fresh OS re-install so I wanted something more solid and guess what PS crashes when I open File Browser

, which luckily I don't need as I prefer ACDSee.
Enough rambling, to the book...
Cheers
Charles