Web site for business? Help please?

[eric]

Hey everyone,
I'm trying to make a website and I have a little experience in visual basic, java and C, but don't know any web design languages... I'm a real beginner in this area.. On the site, I'd like to have the usual things that other sites have like buttons and stuff, but also a way for me to constantly upload videos of new apartments and/or picture slide shows every week. Please let me know where I should start. I got dreamweaver and frontpage but apparently people recommend learning HTML from scratch? Should I learn HTML or XHTML? what about CSS? After this, should I learn flash or javascript?

Please let me know step by step what I need to learn (in terms of programming languages) to get what I want on the webpage, thanks! Also... could you tell me how long it'll take me to make this webpage?
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Fertiggaragen Kamine

[CygnetGames]

A quick overview of the languages involved in web development:

HTML: This is the core of any web-page. It is a set of tags looking like this: <tag-name>contents of tag</tag-name>. The tags organise the content of your page and say what the content is (e.g. a title, a paragraph, a heading, ...).

CSS: This is a set of rules that tell the web browser how to display a HTML page. These say things like: "give every heading a red background", or "make text in the footer 50% smaller than in the main page".

javascript: This is a full programming language that runs on the client side (on the user's computer - executed by their web browser). It used to be used only for very simple things like validating form input, but lately it has become really popular to use it for changing the content of pages dynamically. Javascripts can enter the HTML and CSS code of a page and re-write it based on where the user clicks on a page.

PHP/ASP/JSP/PSP/etc...: These are full programming languages that run on the server side (executed on your web server). (You only need one of these languages, btw.) They are used to change the content of a page each time a user visits it. When the user goes to a page written in a server-side language, the server-side code is executed on the web-server. Lots of things can happen here, including: mathematical calculations, database lookups, cookie reading/writing, pulling data from other websites, sending data to other websites, ... During the execution of this code, a stream of HTML is written out and sent to the client, so after the server-side code has executed, the client is left with a HTML page to display as normal.

XML: This is a markup language that looks very similar to HTML (XHTML is a special type of XML, HTML is a sloppy (and older, soon to become obsolete) version of XHTML). It is used for storing information and passing it between programs / websites.

A lot of the people who learn to program before learning to make websites suggest that you hand-code everything yourself. This gives you the most control over what is happening.

The other alternative is to use templates. These are pre-packages collections of PHP and CSS perform some general functions. You have to customise them for your specific website. You can get these free from many websites.

I would recommend you look at HTML, CSS and PHP. You don't need to be fluent in them, but you should be able to look at someone else's code and be able to see roughly what it does, and be able to modify it to be able to do what you want. When you can do this, you will be at a point where you can decide if you want to hand-code your website or use a template. And you will know if you need to learn javascript.

As for how long it will take, that depends entirely on you. If you just grab a template, change some text and put your logo into it, you could have your site up within a day. But if you want to do it all yourself then it depends entirely on how quickly you learn programming languages.

As for uploading videos: I would recommend uploading them to YouTube and embedding the YouTube video into your site. This will be a lot easier to code and will save bandwidth on your server.

Good luck with it - don't hesitate to ask any other questions. Forums like this are invaluable when learning how to program.