I want to create my own website but I have no clue how to do this or what language I need to know. I only code in c++ and a little HTLM. What would I need to know to give my website life with unique functionality I desire?

Hello,

If you're interested in doing this to learn creating websites I'd recommend reading up on HTML5, CSS and Javascript (in that order). There's lots of resources available online about these topics. After doing some google searching I found https://www.codeschool.com/courses/front-end-formations.

If you are more interesting in just getting results, making something serious like a company website or what ever I'd recommend using any already existing CMS (content management system), these are basically big frameworks which lets you modify the look and content of the website through a control panel. There's also plugins for some extra features like blogs, forums, calendars etc. Here's a list of some different systems for this: http://spyrestudios.com/free-content-management-systems/

I don't have much experience in making websites myself, so I wouldn't be able to provide good advice on creating the unique functionality you desire.

Good luck :)

The classical resource for learning web technologies is w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/). Start with the html5 and css3 tracks, then do the javascript track, as advised by alexw.

Then, you will need to learn frameworks that will make your life *a lot* easier. A must-know is twitter bootstrap (http://getbootstrap.com/). It basically eliminates the need to write your own css (but you still have to know how it works in order to tweak small things).

For simple sites, that's all you are going to need. If you need a little bit more complicated stuff, get familiar with XMLHttpRequest (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XMLHttpRequest - mozilla's site is another great resource for web-related technologies) - this is the backbone of the modern web (in tandem with responsive design, which bootstrap will mostly handle for you). Then you may want to get familiar with jQuery/jQueryUI - do not learn it, just browse the demoes to know what is possible. The popular kid on the block these days for javascript is called anglular js (https://angularjs.org/), so you might want to learn that if you need more complicated web site (99% of people don't, although they they it might be kewl to sprinkle some useless crap to slow down their web site on slower smartphones, which are still prevalent). Still, it doesn't hurt to know what is possible with Angular.

This, mind you, is all on the client - defines the look&feel of your web site. The backend, however, is a different beast. ASP.NET MVC is a good start, since Microsoft have a ton of tutorials and it is easy to get started. If you don't like it, there's Django (if you are familiar with Python), Rails (if you prefer Ruby), CakePHP (if you are familiar with PHP), and.. I'm not a Java person, but I've heard of Spring. Pick the one whose programming language you are most familiar with and you'll find a lot of tutorials online.

Remember, you don't need complicated and fancy stuff just because everybody else is doing it.

Firebug is your best buddy for client web development :)

Now, these are more more complicated advices, so you might want to ignore them at first. Make your site work fast, make it work beautifully on smartphones/tablets via responsive design and don't overuse javascript. Web sites are fast if you do stuff with CSS, not Javascript, and also if you don't use AJAX for everything (if at all). Learn about bundling and minifying javascript/css, learn to use spritesheets with CSS for your images (if you are curious, look at the images in facebook). The goal, just like game programming, is to reduce the number of requests the browser makes to the server for files. The less files the browser has to download, the better. If something is static, put it in CDN. If parts of your site are static, cache them (different serves use different technologies to achieve this).

There is a dirty little secret.

Creating a webpage is really just playing around with HTML (and CSS). No programming involved really.

You can make really really nice looking professional websites with just HTML and CSS and a few images.

HTML is just a markup language meaning its just a bunch of tags enclosing text (just like the bbcode tags we have on this forum).

CSS is used to manipulate the properties of every HTML tag to change how the browser renders it.

Now if you start creating websites with animations and drop down menus and stuff then you will need javascript.

I'll save you the shock. Javascript is nothing like Java. Its a scripting language where every variable is a var type (has hidden data types internally) and classes are really functions. It's totally weird.

If you want to have connectivity to a database and use forms and the like then you will probably want to learn PHP which is a scripting language that is ran by the webserver and stdout from your script is feed to the web browser (your script prints out the webpage).

Now you can have it where all of the logic happens on the server (in your php code) and HTML is printed out to the browser OR you can have javascript call your script and parse data printed out from your PHP script and it can repopulate fields on the screen (more advanced).

However, C++ won't be of any use to you unless you take a walk on the wild side.

There is this ancient concept called the CGI-Bin or CGI binary: basically your web server calls up an executable on the command line passing the get string in the command line and passing the post string as stdin. The CGI-Bin will print out the webpage as stdout. It will also have environmental variables set by the webserver (like what browser they used etc).

I used the CGI-Bin way to create an e-commerce site entirely in COBOL for a school project (showing off of course).

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