A few words of advice... since i'm a female who only does performance to my car (and i have A LOT DONE), i've figured out that the best thing to do to understand and to learn about performance is to do research. The first step is to first understand your motor. If you don't know your basic info then you should learn that first before trying to understand how to make your car faster. Start going online and doing searches on different things you can do to your car...read about it and this way you build up your own knowledge and understand what you want to do with your own car. For an example, if you want to do suspension, ask around to see what companies are out there and what they carry and then go home and research all the ones that where mentioned. You can take advice from other people on what to do to your car...but you should always research and read about what it does, how it works and so on. Before i went Turbo, i made sure i read EVERYTHING possible on the internet to teach myself before i installed it. I learned everything there is to know about Turbo and how it works, the point behind it, and how to maintain it. Now if something goes wrong, i know exactly what the problem is.
Another way to learn and get ideas is to just read forums in the performance section and just see what questions people have and the answers that are given.
My last word of advice is...ASK QUESTIONS!!! Everyone always ask me how i know the things i know and i always tell them it's because i'm not scared to ask question. My favorite quote on this would be, "a person who ask a question is a fool for 5 mintues, but a person who doesn't is a fool for life." So post any performance question, or anything that pops up in your mind
If you want to do looks first, go for it, but while you are doing that, you should start doing your research on performance!
I hope this helps, i know it helped for me and i'm a young female doing Autocrossing and i'm sponsored by 4 companies. It does take time though...so keep it up and good will come from it. I've been around cars since i was 7 years old, so i've learned to enjoy and love them. Good luck