This is pretty hard to explain in text, but I'll do my best.
First of all my basic character setup usually looks like this:
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Let me try and break it down a little more
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The root bone is the main "parent" of your skeleton.
bone1 is a child of root
bone2 is a child of bone1
This means if you translate the root bone, both bone1 and bone2 will follow.
Now in my first hierarchy setup, you can see I have a hip bone. The hip bone is what I translate when I need to move the entire character around. If you want a character to jump, you translate the hip bone and all the children follows it, this goes for rotation and scaling as well. But lets say I want to get some more subtle secondary motion in, but only on the pelvis, like maybe squashing it a bit while it moved down just as the hip moves up, then I can move the pelvis down a bit and scale it on the Y axis. It will still follow the hip bone, but it will also get its own motion.
I will be creating more videos, soon I'll create one that also goes through my workflow in Photoshop etc, and I'll create an entire character from scratch along with some animation.
I highly recommend checking out The Animators Survival Kit. It's an amazing book that will teach you far more than I will ever be able to.
Also take a look at the Animation Workshop video, you might pick up some things there.
Hope it helps. If you have more questions about animation, don't hesitate to ask.
