IMO forget the online resources. Buy a book by someone who knows what they're doing, such as Michael Freeman. He's got some excellent books on composition and photography in general. As for the tech stuff, forget about it. Set it to aperture priority, select a good aperture and shoot away. To really improve you need to shoot a lot, and I mean a lot a lot. Shoot daily, even if it's just your way to work. In the evening, look at the pictures you took. Are you happy with them? How could they be improved meaningfully? One of the best exercises I've found is to shoot hundreds of pictures of a single object. Because this will force you into new perspectives, even if they don't work, it's still meaningful. You're also learning why some things work and why others don't. There are as many ways to shoot a house as there are sand grains on planet Earth. The only limit really is the imagination. So focus on an object and get as much out of that object as you can, if you get 300-400 of the house in the previous example, you can move on. You can also combine this exercise with the books. So if you read something about converging lines, try to get converging lines in a house.