So, I have a little experience with Java, and not as much with Python, and learned a bit about HTML long long ago.

I want to make a very basic website, could probably done in blogger or wordpress easily enough, that will just have some articles on the main page, with links to related articles/websites etc.

I'll still need to get webhosting (willing to pay a small amount).

I want to if it's worth starting on a web language, and if so, which one. Also, if you know of any free resources with a .edu email (just got a huge dev package from github). i can probably get any software needed.

thanks,

This post was edited by ForTheMathematics on Nov 24 2014 09:50pm

If you just need something basic and don't plan on building more sites, I'd personally just use a site builder like you mentioned. Wordpress is definitely one of the better ones imo.

However, if you plan on building more sites and have an interesting in know web development languages... Brush up on HTML again. It probably hasn't changed too much since the last time you used it. I'd then learn javascript, jQuery, and PHP. Also, from what I've heard, Ruby is a pretty good web development language which is user friendly, relatively speaking. I've only used it a couple of times so I can say whether it is or not but it might be worth looking into.

Here's a pretty good site that teaches you the fundamentals of a few different languages (php, javascript, ruby, python, etc) in an interactive way

http://www.codecademy.com/

Yeah I used that site for python. i'll probably just whip something up in wordpress to experiment.

any reason as to why I should brush up html?

HTML is what all sites are structured with. If you're going to use a CMS such as Wordpress, it's not completely necessary to know as it dynamically generates the HTML for you. If you plan on writing your own sites from scratch, you would need to know it.

This post was edited by SelfTaught on Nov 26 2014 07:00pm

dont forget, if you wanna write anything that needs to manipulate the html or if you need to put something in the html manually, that html needs to be readable. tools that auto generate html/css are notorious for writing very poor html/css. if you have outlook, look at any email you have. write out the html/css you would write to generate that exact email. then right click + view source to look at the html that was auto generated. it looks 10x worse than the html/css you just wrote by hand.

Ah yeah, good point. The code Wordpress generates isn't too bad actually. I have seen site builders that output god awful code such as dreamweaver. So i guess it just depends on the builder.

I usually just view the html source through firebug or the browser's native dev tools which automagically formats it, even if its minified. That can become a hassle though in certain situations.