Customizing a Views HTML I'll start off saying I'm pretty new to Drupal. 
I'm trying to customize the way a view displays. I want it to look like the Industry News section on this page: http://www.silverfishdevelopment.com/clients/maafs

However I'm confused as to what I want to actually edit. Do I want to create a custom views-view.tpl.php file? Or style output, or row style, etc?

And if I create a new tpl file, what are the variables I can use?

I was trying to follow this: http://www.wdtutorials.com/2011/06/29/drupal-7-how-create-custom-template-view#.VPXOIXXN9cY but couldn't get it to print out the $fields data.

Or am I approaching this all wrong?

If you know of a great tutorial too I'd appreciate that as well. 
I'm a little overwhelmed with all of it. Thanks for any help you can give.
I found that Semantic Views worked best for me in this situation. It cuts down on the amount of HTML outputted by Drupal Views and allows you to define the HTML tag that wraps each field as well as add a CSS class.