So I discovered this website called “clay geeks” which is a great place to consider experimenting with different construction methods:

 http://www.claygeek.com/clay-101/basics-of-construction/

As I mentioned before, I prefer doing slabs and I’m not so intent on achieving precise consistency in width across the slab, sometimes differing widths adds an interesting effect to the piece.  Here’s a nice overview of slab construction:

http://www.jhpottery.com/tutorial/slab.html 

For construction of other handbuilt pieces, see methods illustrated here:

http://www.jhpottery.com/jhpottery.html