These days you can learn how to play guitar over the internet. Check out Mark McKenzie's guitar video lessons here: http://www.jamoramaguitar.com The videos are very easy to follow and to my surprise extremely helpful even for advanced guitar players. For beginners I would have to say this is a gold mine.
I was able to improve my skills in just under 4 weeks and I am an intermediate-to-advanced guitar player; I've been playing guitar for the past 6 years and I was on stage with my band a lot of times.
I live in New York City, I wanted to go to a pro guitar teacher but that would have cost me over $1400 per month. Good thing with this internet, $1400 it's a lot of money for me. Good luck!
Hey I see that you are looking for some online guitar lessons. Have you seen the Jamorama website which is apparently very good. At the moment they also have 6 free lessons for you so that may be a web site that you could check out .
You might like Jamorama. They've got really easy-to-follow lessons with videos and audio (of course:)) and other cool resources. You can learn at your own pace and lessons are geared to everyone from the total newbie to the advanced player.
It sure beats the trial-and-error method I used when learning. It's also better than having to go to some teacher every week who you'll pay lots of money to.
Download guitar videos especially the one you like the most from youtube that shows you the chords and hand position. Use the youtube downloader to save the videos into your computer file. watch it many times and memorize the position of the hand. i used this method when i got my first guitar :)