Advice needed on buying/building a PC

I recently built my own pc for the first time.

I used http://pcpartpicker.com/

But first I read this article and it was pretty helpful: http://lifehacker.com/5827145/how-to-bui...your-parts

I skimmed through this a little bit and it looks like it has some pretty useful information. I'll be sure to give it a more thorough read a little later.

In process of writing this post; will post first and slowly edit as I write:

I just built my desktop for the first time a couple months ago, so here's my 2 cents:

How urgently do you want to build (or buy outright) your computer? Black Friday doesn't always give you the best deals, believe it or not, because like all retailers, prices creep up starting around August and the "discount" that you get from Black Friday deals might not be all that much more than if you spent about half a year just bargain hunting. If you want the stuff NOW, then sure the bundles are decent, but if you can live with your current potato for a bit longer, you can get significantly better deals off-season.

First thing that I would start with is: How large do you want your (desktop) tower (a.k.a. case) to be? Smaller cases will have some limits to how much you can put in them and you might run into problems should you want to add more components down the road.
Full size tower -> any size motherboard (a.k.a. MoBo) basically, up to ATX (the largest)
- Lots of space, no real need to worry about squishing everything into a tiny case
- More space means possibly better cooling; only consider this if you plan on overclocking or live in an oven
- Lots of room for expansion if you want to do SLI or Crossfire (more on this below) in the future
Mid to small size tower -> MiniATX or MicroATX motherboard (this depends in the case you choose, it should tell you what size will fit)
- Takes up less space on your floor / desk
- More compact

I'm not really in any rush to buy one, I just have some spare cash right now from working lots of overtime the past month and decided this would be a good use for it.

I most likely won't be upgrading/adding onto it unless it's absolutely necessary, so something massive won't really be necessary, but I'd also like to stay away from smaller cases just so I can avoid any possible issues later on down the road, so something in between would be fine, I guess.