dab,
You don't need to start up any fermentation again after racking. I'm not sure what the HBS bloke meant by that. The whole point of racking is to let your beer 'condition' away from the primary yeast cake which can impart off flavours if left too long. It may still bubble along slowly which isd fine, but you don't 'restart' fermentation itself. Especially with Ales, and especially if you aren't worried about really clearing your beer then there is no need to rack if you don't want to. Bottle away. Racking does really help with clearing your beer and in 'conditioning' it - I guess stabilising the flavours and maturing it a bit is a good way to think about it. In lagers it is especially necessary because you are generally talking about paler beers which you want as clear as possible. Dodgy flavours are also much harder to hide in lager styles compared to big rich dark ales for example, and racking to secondary helps the yeasties clean up a lot of the weird flavours sometimes produced by primary fermentation.
If you can keep your secondary below say, 18 degrees or so, maybe 20 tops (basically as cool as is practicable), then your beers will improve in terms of clarity and flavour as long as you are clean enough to avoid infection, minimise splashing and bubbling when transferring, and can keep it in a vessel without too much headspace. That was all I was trying to really get across in my last post. Transferring 23 litres of recently fermented beer into a 60 litre fermenter and leaving for two weeks
may cause problems due to too great an exposure to oxygen. Ideally your secondary fermenter should have as little headspace as possible. In my case I have 3 25 litre fermenters and use all 3 for primary, secondary and cold conditioning. In an ideal world I would have even smaller vessels for cold conditioning but so far no probs.
Have you checked out
http://www.howtobrew.com ? David Palmer is a US homebrew guru and I think you'll find more than enough info on his site to help you out. You can get his book at most good HBS around the place too. Worth a look. His book and a few various web forums like this one have helped me move from kit and kilo brewing through extract 'n grain, partial mashing and now all grain brewing. There is a helluva lot to learn out there. I'm about to bottle my second all grain brew and am putting together the recipe for the next. Can't wait...
Good luck. Keep asking heaps of questions. Someone'll help you out.
Shawn.