[karterk]

You might want to read this article first: http://www.shubharamani.com/wordpress/?p=31

It summarizes some of the challenges you will face as you go about building your vision into an actual product.

The hardest part is getting started, and it's great that you have already crossed that bridge. I know a lot of people on HN here will disagree with me - but if you want to just dip your feet and start hacking around - PHP will be a very nice option for you. PHP is rather simple and will allow you to start building things and getting basic stuff like how the web works (HTTP requests, responses, page loads etc.).

As mentioned in the article, you also need to know a decent amount of HTML and CSS for basic formatting of your page. Or, you can find a template (plenty online) which you can modify.

Finally - if you want to do something like emailing people etc. - it involves learning a bit about how web hosting works. This is another place where PHP might be helpful as most web hosts support PHP by default.

There is no one true way to go about learning stuff. Be prepared to be patient and learn by exploring rather than trying to read tutorials and trying to get a hang of everything at once.