Hi All, I have been learning HTML and CSS for few months now (investing whatever time I can from my day job). With a good understanding now of various elements and their semantics I am able to build decent enough static webpages. My short term aim is to create a travel blog of a very specific state/region and earn ad revenue from the blog hoping its gets enough hits. My ultimate long term aim from the blog is as it gathers traction is to start an ecommerce platform on the blog that helps people book homestays. So my short questions are: 1) What are the avenues to earn ad revenue and how? 2) What skills apart from HTML CSS should I be learning to establish an ecommerce platform and what resources are there to learn them? PS: I am also simultaneously reading articles here and I am sure I will eventually find the answers hidden somewhere here. But if someone can suggest a book/online resource that explains the complete website design journey it would be of immense help. Thanks!
If you're planning on setting up a blog / e-commerce site _yourself_, my suggestion is: forget about it. That is a rather complex endeavour, especially if you don't know anything about server-side programming, and security. Better to go for an existing solution. My suggestion would be Wordpress for the blog, which can be extended to include ecommerce capabilities at a later date, for example by using WooCommerce or one of the other e-commerce plugins for Wordpress.
Wordpress is an attackers magnet and it generates glibberish code. The wysiwyg sucks very badly. It has tons of bloat, I have used it during years and I DON'T recommend it. Now I'm using wok (http://wok.mythmon.com/). From templates and content it generates a full static site with pagination without hassle. You can embed comments with Disqus although I prefer to only give a mail contact address... moderating comments and dealing with trolls is a pain. To learn proper HTML/CSS look at cutcodedown.com and its links.
Wordpress itself can be tweaked to do mostly anything you want, including producing decent code. However, the more plugins you add to it, the worse it gets. As for an attackers magnet, that is somewhat true, but there are plenty of ways to limit the attack-vectors. Using Wok for a combined blog/e-commerce site will be mostly impossible, as I understand it, since you don't really have anything running on the server (database, stock, payment gateways and so on). Not really fitting for the OPs wants. That is a good suggestion. However, proper HTML and CSS will only get you so far. To build something like the OP sounds like s/he wants, you'll need some advanced knowledge of both server-side and javascript as well. And creating such things, especially the ecommerce-site, from scratch, is really just reinventing the wheel over again, and most likely very badly as well, if you're not a seasoned programmer, with a team to back you up. Most of the big ecommerce solutions has problems, but they have some thing that a brand new, badly coded solution won't have, and that is an ongoing development, with continuous improvements and updates. Maybe not excellent HTML (output), but most of them have done quick work with getting rid of bugs and problems with the server-side code. It's a bit of a conundrum - do you want to spend 1-2 years getting up to a workable level in programming, and then the next 2-3 years building your solution, getting hit in the face at least 20 times on the way, having to redo everything and starting over, or use some of the existing solutions, maybe hire someone to help set it up, and mostly forget about it, apart from running updates and up the general security, and get on with making money.
Adding on to @PoPSiCLe's comments - all you'll do in that time is "recreate the wheel". Pick a content management system - I'd go for something mainstream with a decent sized user community contributing to the code. WordPress is fine. Then what you do is code up the stuff that will make your site unique and valuable - your point of difference. This will "get you to market" more quickly and let you focus on your business. Your 2 questions don't match the thread title so I'm a little confused there. All websites should be responsive, it's a non-negotiable. There are still design choices to be made regarding parallax and other gimmicks but responsive isn't one of them. You need to learn PHP and javascript and good code design and object oriented code. We really don't use OO enough.
I too will recommend WordPress. The WooCommerce plugin is very popular. It's an eCommerce plugin. If you are going to use a payment gateway of some kind, better use a plugin / platform which is tried and test. And, WordPress is the best option for a blogger ( unless you are a blogger.com fan ).
For ecommerce I'd use a perl shopping cart and get the payment only through paypal or bank transfer... this way you avoid critical security errors like taking the CC data. I was tried to be billed illegally after buying in an online shop and I'd never buy again there.
If you're looking to establish an ecommerce store, I'd definitely check out Shopify. It's pretty awesome, managed, simple templating, good api's, definitely a lot easier to pick up then some of the other platforms out there (magento, etc). It also has blogging built in if you chose to use it.