Beginner Web Site Designer In Need of Help

Hi, my name is Christopher Petty and I am 15 years old. I am a beginner web site designer, and I want to create my own website. The problem is, I don't know what type of website to create. I want something that people of all ages can go to and have fun, but can't decide whether to do a virtual pet website, or come up with one of my own. Please help me by answering the questions below. I probably won't be back here, so I'd appreciate it if you'd email me at cpettysan@yahoo.com!

1) What book or software is best for learning web development?
2) What software or program is best for web design (graphics, layout, etc)? Is there a freeware of it?
3) How much a month or year will it cost to run a website?
4) Will I need a server and how much will it cost?
5) Anything else you want to add...

Why is this the 5th time you've posted this? I can find similar versions of this thread here, here, here and here.

Use css,(Cascade style sheet) downlad topstyle lite, its free, thats for designing your pages, get adobe photoshop to make your backgrounds, get front page, apache, php too

1) What book or software is best for learning web development?
dont get a book everything you need can be found using google or yahoo, as for software id go for dreamweaver

2) What software or program is best for web design (graphics, layout, etc)? Is there a freeware of it?

photoshop probably but PSP is easier and theres also fireworks

3) How much a month or year will it cost to run a website?

depends on what you need but it can cost as low as £20($30 ish)

4) Will I need a server and how much will it cost?

no

5) Anything else you want to add...

For website design and layout I think Dreamweaver MX is fantastic. Its really not cheap (around £300) but is far better than MS FrontPage.

Of course if you're on a budget you could just use textpad and do it by hand. That is worth starting with anyway, because it will always help to be able to understand the HTML and css code. There are plenty of good free HTML tutorials.

The Gimp is a freeware image editor you may want to look into. As for some HTML development advice, find a nice text editor and learn to build web sites by hand. You have much greater control of your code so you can fine tune it. Also, you can make sure you don't have a lot of extra junk in there which can be a pain if you're on a very busy site. I personnaly despise apps where you build a web site like you make an image in Photoshop. They just don't make the code as nice as I want it to be.

Here are some text editors:

Eclipse
NoteTab
Vim (Hard to learn, but good to know if you ever plan on working on a Linux/BSD/Unix system)

I use the graphical version of Vim, gVim, at work mainly because it's faster than using Dreamweaver and I want to keep my vi skills semi-decent. Of the three, Vim is the only one that I definately know handles Unicode, which you may find important depending on what you're doing. Dreamweaver also handles Unicode.

Making a virtual pet website as your first one? Dude, start small. But yeah, writing the code yourself is the best way to go.

1st Page by EvrSoft. Free and a very good editor.
EvrSoft