The number one thing you should work on as a chess novice (and a chess intermediate!) is tactics. chesstempo.com is the best place on the web to practice tactic

The number one thing you should work on as a chess novice (and a chess intermediate!) is tactics. chesstempo.com is the best place on the web to practice tactics: it serves you tactics problems from a database of over 100,000 problems harvested from actual games, and keeps track of both your ability and the difficulty of the problems so that it can give you problems appropriate to your level. There are other tactics servers on the web (chess.com, chess.emrald.net), but Chess Tempo is easily the best.