I wanted to have the introtext underneath the image but it was doing this staggering thing on the rows. I'd like the top of each row to be lined up. what would I have to do to achieve this.
You can as well set the height of introtext to a fixed value using css and add overflow: hidden so that any content that gets out of this box is hidden. In my experience this works better than limiting by php as it doesn't break any html tags that might be in the text.