Liza,
You're very welcome ... but I should have preceded each long post with something like: "here's something for you to read during the winter when there's nothing to do in the garden except plan and think".
I think the short form would be:
if you can get compost or soil amendments into your bed before planting, that's a very good thing.
You're probably smart to start with seedling plants - if someone is selling them now, it's probably a fairly good time to plant them, now. There's always next year to try a few rows of seeds and see what comes up (it's mainly an issue of keeping them moist, and keeping them from being eaten until they're big enough to survive a few bites).
If your soil is already fairly fertile, you might want to consider running a narrow walking path down the middle of your 8x8 bed, and treat the two halves as two wide rows to be planted fairly thickly, but never walked on.
