First of all Mike very nice start to a tank. I like the aquascaping you've done with the rocks and driftwood - Also very nice placement of the plants!
We'll start at the start
Substrate is your bottom layer so in your case it looks like you have sand, Sand unfortunetly has no Nutrients what so ever in it unless dosed by you with root tabs. Just like your flowers and garden to grow plants they need to get some nutrients from somewhere lucky for you, you can dose the water column and your plants will get enough to survive.
Fert Dosing - Exactly what I've explained prior. This is your Iron, Magnese, Potassium, Nitrogen, Phospherous. If your new into this I would suggest that you do some research and just suppliment your plants with just plain old Flourish, make sure it's not excel until you can read up on your fertilization and nutrient balancing.
Lighting - If your lights are just a stock system they are most likely T8 Bulbs (They are just like Florescent shop lights Thick and it will say the Watts on the end of the bulb) - Most planted tanks have T5 Bulbs which are very Thin - I'm not going to get into the reasons why you should have T5 rather then T8 and the difference between 6700k and 10000k and so on. Also the general rule of thumb is to have the right Watts Per Gallon - I'm not sure how big your tank is I'm guessing it's around 90G so to get 1 WPG you would need 90 Watts of Light. People usually class low light plants to be around 1WPG Medium - 1.5-2.5 and High 2.5 - 3 (You dont want to go much past 3, It will be tough controlling your algae, also theres no real need to.
Also you want to keep your photo period to around 8 hours you can increase it but then again it's about the balancing your algae and controlling that. Your lights are acting like the Sun for your plants to Photosynthisize (Spelling Ugh) Exactly like your grade 10 Biology!!
Anyways man I hope I cleared some stuff up for you, you can always feel free to direct any questions you have to me through Private Message.
I have to point you to the world wide web man, research EVERYTHING before starting and jumping in when you think you've researched enough research more. I'm a firm believer in making mistakes and learning from them but we all need an understanding and it's making beneifical mistakes that benefit us the best.
Sorry for the spelling..
Cheers.
