Learning to Program: How long will it take?

My first question.. If I were to set out to make a website - the primary skill involved in making it would be programming, correct? Therefore if I wanted to build my own website, I should focus on programming languages or are there more components?

Second question, how long, generally, would it take to learn enough to make a decent website - something that would otherwise cost a couple thousand? One year, few years?

Third, where shall I start, C#?

 

Well if you decide to do all by yourself then it could take years to master different technologies. First it's the design part.
Design part = typography, usability, colors, space

Then it's the frontend part
Frontend part = xhtml, css, javascript, cross browser issues

Well the programming part is a matter of a taste. I should start with open source technologies where you don't need to invest a decent amount of money for tools. php and mysql are so popular and you can find resources, help, tutorials almost everywhere.

I think that's impossible to master everything. Yes, you can get a good understanding from everything but reaching the 100% of all these stuff can be time consuming, even impossible for some people.

MHO

 

I think how quickly you learn depends on how much time you put into it.

PHP is a popular web programming language because it's easy to use to store and retrieve data from databases. If you want to make your website in PHP, you could code your pages using html which defines tables and can be used to format font and make forms to allow users to enter data, PHP would allow you to take the data entered by the user and store it in a database (you would use MySQL statements with PHP)

A good place to start would be to look at these tutorials and do the examples
HTML: http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
PHP: http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp

Or you could learn ASP.net which involves using aspx pages with C# code behind. aspx pages are displayed to the user and consist of asp tags for buttons and text fields and also have html elements which provide the presentation of the page whereas the C# code behind provides the functionality for the page, for example, if the user clicks the button in the web page it will exectute the appropriate code in the C# code for that page which might save details entered by the user into the database.

http://www.w3schools.com/aspnet/default.asp

Hope this helps!

 

Nate - You may hear laughter from "serious" webmasters on this, but for a first webpage your best bet is to have it up sooner rather than perfect... and there are canned WYSIWYG website building packages like MS FrontPage that'll do an adequate job of allowing you to build a site without knowing all the underlying code. Being a webmaster isnt synonymous with being a code-pro... you can hire those if you need... the idea is to be a business-owner, and owners don't always know how to do every detail of creating the product they sell. Besides, if you are selling a product, the website is the medium of advertising and possibly distribution, not the product itself.

The rest you can pick up as you figure out what you need... but having the newest and flashiest FLASH landing page and such isnt nearly as important as getting the product in front of people. Truth be known the SEs are less friendly to flash than they are basic HTML anyway... spiders see FLASH as a picture.

Dont let the purists pseudo-experts sell you the idea that you must handwrite every piece of code or it doesnt count. Not true. The perfect mousetrap that never hits the market will never outproduce the functional mousetrap thats already on the shelf when the customer arrives.

 

if that's about an static webpage , html code is enough. and html code are about 70 code , you can learn it about max one week.
dynamic webpage is more complex because are about session and database and ...
but i think about max 2 month is enough to learn it. good luck!

 

he was talking about something that would otherwise cost several thousand dolars. That would mean a complex webapplication that could take a few months for a develop (for a professional team). Or at least it would in eastern Europe where a few thousand dollars buy you a lot

 

PHP is all you need. That plus CSS design. It shouldn't take you more than a few months. You spend a lot of time online already (spewing about politics), so if you actually devoted more time to webmastering, you could make at least $25,000 in one year.

I suggest you go the custom route, like I did, because you make more money from custom websites than you do from CMS (like Wordpress), just because your website structure is different.

Look around and buy a LAMP hosting package and learn the basics of PHP with MySQL support. It's actually much easier to learn PHP these days then it used to be.

 

I would say, go learn valid XHTML first (its actually the same as html, but a standardised version), and learn some graphics tools like photoshop or fireworks if you want a design design. Then go learn PHP when you think you're ready with the basics. You only need C# if you're learning ASP instead of PHP (which is more popular). But for my case, I learnt C# in sch so I'm more familiar with it, but gotta learn php on my own soon.

 

thanks everyone, lot's of input gathered. The only reason I'm not "hitting the books" learning programming right now is the fact that I seriously question how much programmers will be needed in the coming years. Do any of you think, with all the technological advances we're having, that very soon programming could be taken to a whole new level? What I mean is.. competition benefits the consumers not the producers.. with so much of it in this field isn't there a great likelihood many of the programming needs will be greatly reduced soon?

With that in mind, still learn it to earn money on the side?