Anki works well for memorization.

start from simple characters or what you are interested in. but u need to know the meaning. this will be easier to remember.A helpful app is also a good choice.

If you want to write them properly, you should remember about the stroke order. You'll find the basic rules here: http://www.zhongwen.com/shufa/ (very helpful site by the way, so check it out). Animated stroke order for specific characters can be found here for example: http://kakijun.jp/ (this one is for Japanese, but as you probably know, many characters are the same). Another thing is the proportions. From my experience, many beginners have hard time with keeping the characters equal size. You can practice that by writing hanzi on a sheet of paper with squares on it. You can generate them yourself here: http://cop.yes-chinese.com/hanban/tzg/en/

If you want input to pc,you can use a software named wnwb.then when you type english,maybe it can display chinese .