As a beginner I did not realize that for each character I can click on the Magnifying glass at right and then go to one of several dictionaries and see an animation of the stroke order.
I keep one browser tab open to http://www.nciku.com/ so I can go there and practice the stroke order.
I have my Word document open with MS Pinyin and I make notes of the pinyin , tone, character, definition, radical number and I make note of HOW the character in Word looks since sometimes there are slight differences. Thanks!

You can see the stroke order in Skritter as well. Just HOLD the ? on the study page and it will show you the animation. Practice stroke order is also what you do on Skritter. Same with pinyin etc. All the info is on the study page. The differences you are talking about are most likely just FONT differences. Water radical e.g. might look differently on different fonts. This you will learn by time any way. On the magnifying glass you have a lot of very useful other info though. Like words having this characters or other characters with this part in it etc. You can mark words for study directly here, very useful i think at least.

Agreed. I also love the etymologies. As the prompt would put it: "Great jorb!"