Things to learn - separation of style and content - very very important - check out this site for inspiration of what is possible with HTML and CSS alone - http://www.csszengarden.com/

Read about the right way to code, web standards are important for how HTML and CSS is presented to our browsers - A list apart is a great site to help keep abreast of web standards. http://www.alistapart.com/

Correct coding conventions are also very important - the way you write code - The way it is presented see more to others. There is generally several ways to write the same statement, and more ways of achieving the same result, but try to learn stuff like which conditional statements are faster? which ones should you use? how should you write them? are abbreviated forms acceptable? Should you cater for different server setups?

There are a multitude of these type of questions that should follow conventions if implemented correctly.


Regarding Smarty - I use it on a few sites that I've written, it's a great templating system that is very easy to implement. It is extremely powerful when coupled with associative arrays or class (object) based coding. You can very quickly get a site together by paying attention to database structuring, and object properties and aligning both with your templates.

Using libraries such as Smarty (or Jquery - as Dolphin does), is a quick way to get results without having to hard code everything from scratch, most of the time, learning how to implement / modify a library, is more use than learning how to write code to replicate it, and a darn site quicker too.

Try looking at a few of these sites -

http://jquery.com/
http://mootools.net/
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

HTH