Wow, Kitsu, not sure your huge list of resources is relevant for beginners - which is the vibe this thread is giving me - but definitely nice to have for those who have the basics down and wants to expand their world of web-designing.
Yeah, most of it probably isn't. But I figured that the top resources (mainly (X)HTML and CSS links) would be relevant, and then if the OP, or anyone else, wanted to learn more, maybe some of the other links would be relevant or useful.
At any rate, if you (refering to the OP) don't have any experience, then it's best if just dive into HTML markup and CSS, as that's at the heart of every website, it's sort of the scaffolding or visual framework. Things like PHP, MySQL, etc. are the internals, the plumbing or the organs, or however you like to think of it. PHP, as aforementioned, is one of the most common and powerful (although once you get experience and are comfortable with web design, you can look into things like Ruby On Rails or Python frameworks, etc. but right now that'd just confuse you.) language. It's relatively easy to learn, as most of it is fairly straightforward.
If you do get into web development/programming, then one of the easiest ways to practice that is to install something like
XAMPP or WAMP, or other similar local server. They are pretty easy to set up (on Windows it's mainly clicking through installers, unless you grab the .zip version and go from there, either way, easy. There's plenty of tutorials on YouTube and other places if you get confused.) and useful for testing stuff, espeically if you don't have hosting yet, or don't want it at the moment, or whatever.
When it comes to learning HTML, I think it's best to just look at it for what it is: a markup language. It basically tells the browser, "How should the page be structured?". There's a certain patternicity to it, actually. You almost always have <open> and </close> tags. Closing tags always have the forward-slash. CSS on the other hand, is basically "What should the page look like?" and relies on the structure (HTML) to determine what should look like what. In CSS you don't write structure or logic, but instead you declare rules. A rule might be something like:
body {
background:rgba(114, 115, 115, 0.5);
}
which tells the renderer to render the background (body) of the page in the defined color, at 0.5 alpha level (in other words, 50% opacity).
Both are very easy once you get the hang of it, and will usually start to come naturally after a while. The hardest part - for me at least, because I'm not a designer - is making the CSS look
good. It's easy to write rules, but can be difficult to make it all coherent and fluid.
