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I’m crazy, I know.

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Dec 04.2007

Okay, I want to program a site.

It will host a lot of photography, host video, have profiles, have voting abilities, comments, blog, and have commerce capabilities.

Only problem. I don’t program. I want to get started.

Now, you’re all going to think I’m crazy, and that I need tons of time to learn these things. Even years.

Well, don’t worry about that. Where do I get started? What languages do I need to know? What are all the skills I shoudl have to be able to do this?

I’m finding a partner who will help me, so I won’t do it alone. But I really want to learn all the programming necessary over time.

P.S. I know quite a lot about computers in many respects.. but haven’t dealt with much more than a bit of html.

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@ray326Dec 04.2007 — Get started by not reinventing the wheel. Check out all the example CMSs at http://opensourcecms.com and see if one almost does what you need.
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@TJ111Dec 04.2007 — I'm a self taught web-designer myself. If you're motivated, you'll catch on pretty quick (and start to like it). Learning from my experience, here's how I'd recommend you do it.

Start off with HTML and CSS. Start by just writing some basic websites, trying to customize them as much as possible and making them as professional looking as you can. Just tinker around alot, change little things and watch what changes, what breaks, etc. I used the tutorials over at http://www.w3schools.com, which give you a good rundown of the concepts, but never really puts it all together for you. That also a good website to use just for a reference while you work. You'll get a handle on HTML and CSS in a few days, although you won't learn all the quirks, tricks, etc until you start getting some more experience with it.

I'd recommend [url=http://validator.w3.org]validating[/url] your code as often as possible, as that'll help you know what you can and can't do, and also check to see if its a coding error messing up the page.

Also, install lots of browsers to test on. Get Multiple IE's, IE7, Firefox 1.5,2,3, Opera, and Safari. Alot of times different browsers will display things differently (:cough: IE), so it's good to see early.

I'd learn Javascript next. The way I taught myself Javascript (and PHP) was just come up with some ideas for what I wanted my page to do, then searching around the internet for examples on how to do it. Set a goal, then figure out how you can accomplish it. A good place to start would be something like a button to show/hide different parts of your page, or an image that changes on mouseover. You can get the basic idea's of scripting down in about a week, although it takes alot more time and alot more trial and error to figure it all out.

Then do the same thing with a server-side language (I'd recommend PHP because it's free, easy to setup locally with WAMP, and has amazing documentation). Try to do something like having a login page or creating dynamic html. Also I'd recommend learning how to store and retrieve information from a database while your at it.

Once you got HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP (or other) down, then you can start doing some pretty neat stuff. Go find some Ajax tutorials that will show you how you can have your javascript talk to the server, get information from the server, and display the information on your page. This step might be a ways off, but its something to look forward to.

Anyways, just recommendations from my experience, take em or leave em. I personally learned PHP first, and switching to Javascript after wasn't that hard. Once you know how to program, learning a new language is just a matter of learning all the different syntaxes.

Post your practice pages up here when yo run into trouble and someone will help you out.
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