Change catalog images size magento

[titom]

I am trying to change the size of my catalog images. I changed the css and also used the resize function \[code\]<?php <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15604257/<?php echo $_product->getProductUrl() ?>" title="<?php echo $this->stripTags($this->getImageLabel($_product, 'small_image'), null, true) ?>" class="product-image"><img src="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15604257/<?php echo $this->helper('catalog/image')->init($_product, 'small_image')->resize(196); ?>" width="135" height="296" alt="<?php echo $this->stripTags($this->getImageLabel($_product, 'small_image'), null, true) ?>" /></a>\[/code\]But it didn't work. It seems like my template has properties for the category images declared. In the code the category products have size applied to them:245x245. I have been looking everywhere to change it but nothing worked. I saw that magento go lets you overwrite the the default size and proportion of any catalog image in the back end. But I don't see the same in the community..