Schema Scheming

I've been prototyping the database over and overagaing, trying to find a ballance between ease of coding and what I believe will be high performance. There are a couple of isues with this, one of them is simply that I am not a DBA. If I was, I'm sure that this would have been done long ago and I would currently be fretting about other things. Second, There are many designs that will work. Thousands of combinations that can contain the data in a readable format, but the question is "How efficient is this one, or this one, or that one..." I'll have to set a time limit for myself and just go with the best one I have at that point, understanding that it will probably be re-factored at some future time. Next post... the basic schema!