I do all my websites in COBOL. Seriously, use what you are comfortable with. PHP is popular because it ran as an apache module on just about any platform very early on. Perl and Python initially had to run as cgi and ruby was late to the party. Good coding practices are more important than the language.
PHP is the best for web development. but u can always try from the simplest coding which is Html and CSS
Well Html is the basic thing which will be always used whatever coding you use for the web development. But i would like to go for PhP for the website development. It secure and open source and you can get the source code of your website which is very important. Instead other website like developed in .net it's no doubt much secure but it's very expensive and time consuming.
xHTML, CSS and either PHP or Ruby. For xhtml, learn to write it by hand... CSS is where you will spend most of your time. For CSS, use Skybound Stylizer. It saves many keystrokes once you know what you're doing with CSS. For PHP and Ruby, learn to use a framework. - Popular PHP Frameworks: Zend, Codeigniter, CakePHP, Symfony, etc - Popular Ruby Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, etc
Try learning PHP for web process. HTML makes electricity sites. It you requisite propulsive websites then PHP is for you.
Web Development basically means the designing of website. There are some languages which can be used for design purpose and they are HTML(Hyper Text Markup Language), CSS(Cascading Style Sheet), Java Script, PHP, and Dot Net. But i would prefer Dot Net language as it provide loots of designing components. It also provides lots of tools that can be used in web development. I am a web developer and i am using Dot Net and Java Script.