[adamconroy]

It depends what you are trying to achieve, but acquiring a cms of some variety, then hacking on that is not a bad way to learn.

I'm not a web UI programmer, although have been at times over the years and still do some professional work in that space, but a little while ago I created a website for a friend's business as a hobby project for me.

I chose to use Drupal, which is a php based cms, and used a paas called pantheon. https://pantheon.io/docs/articles/getting-started/

The good thing about this approach was that I had a fully functional site to start with, built with reasonably good practices (progressive enhancement etc), and I was able to hack away on it and taught myself some php as I needed to achieve certain things that weren't available out of the box. I found it quite interesting to dig around and see how they structured the site, particularly the css strategies.