When getting started with web development, there are many different approaches you can take. A designer might take the Photoshop approach where the website is drawn out in an application such as Abobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks and then export it to HTML to create a template. Another approach is to learn mark-up such as HTML and CSS for styling, then learn a scripting language for dynamic content.Scripting languages vary widely so it is very important to do some research and find the language that suits your needs the most. A few great languages to learn are:

PHP: PHP is a very widely used server-side open source language. PHP is a simple language to pick up as it has great documentation. It is also simple at executing commands such as retrieving and inputting data into databases. Some well known websites that use PHP include: Wikipedia, WordPress, and Yahoo. A few helpful resources to learn PHP are: PHP Academy, w3schools, and of course PHP.net itself.

Javascript: Javascript is a language that has been picking up a lot of credit lately. One key advantage that Javascript has over other languages is its ability to render web pages extremely fast which is achieved by sending only JSON or XML to the client rather than having to send the HTML every time. Javascript also has platforms such as Node.js which allows for server side development which is helping the language achieve more than it ever has. Some resources to learn Javascript include: Barebones.js Screencasts, .appendTo, and JavaScript Garden.