Stemper, I recommend that you start with a book. A good one is Understanding Orchids by William Cullina. It covers everything you need to know to get started and gives you a good intermediate overview to lead to other sources and focus your knowledge and interests. It's reasonably priced from Amazon, somewhere in the mid 30's.
The information that Ross gave you is very good and very true, but you need much more to get an understanding that will allow you to be successful with orchids.
I'm sure a thousand people will kill me for this, but it's my observation and my opinion. The absolute worse way to get started is to ask isolated questions on an internet message board because you will get conflicting answers, many of them flat wrong, and you have no basis for sorting the valuable from the other stuff. You are not in a position to know the expertise of the person attempting to answer questions for you.
Go to any book and you can at least reasonably assume that the information was filtered for fact before it was printed. AOS offers some good beginners information both online and printed. It's short and limited in scope, but at least it's reliable. If I remember correctly you get some of this stuff free just by joining AOS.
This is a fun (and expensive) hobby to pursue avidly and getting started correctly is vital to your success. Remember a wise person once said, "It takes twice is much information to overcome a first false impression than to arrive at the correct impression the first time". Start right and you won't regret it. Too many people start out on the internet, get widely differing information, pick and choose what they like without any factual basis whatsoever, and fail to stay with hobby because they fail to succeed and drift away. You have no way to verify that the person answering a message board question knows anymore than you do.
And YES, apply the same careful judgment to what I just told you that I suggest you apply to all other answers since you don't know me either.
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