How did you make your website?

[mainbutter]

I code by hand in a text editor(ultraedit, though any text editor, even notepad, works). I'm pretty new to this web programming/design stuff so I'm learning all the basics and learning to make a modern website from scratch before jumping into using Adobe Dreamweaver(a WYSIWYG, or "what you see is what you get", website builder) or anything like that.

It sounds like the kind of website you want to design would be pretty easy to just code by hand after reading a book or two on html and CSS. You wouldn't need PHP or javascript or mysql for anything like that, but a working knowledge of photoshop(on my list of "things to learn") or similar image editor/creator programs will help with any graphics you might want for your website.

My suggestion to you, if you don't know anything about web programming, HTML, or CSS, is to first read up on HTML. It's very basic in structure and you can read over the entirety of HTML and understand it in an afternoon. Then build a home page using just HTML so you get a working knowledge of how to write HTML code, that would take another afternoon.

To "prettify" a webpage, the easy and modern solution is using CSS, which adds styles to HTML tags to change font/color/position paragraphs, and many more interesting possibilities.

If you want to learn CSS(highly recommended), I recommend picking up a book called "The Missing Manual: CSS", also written sometimes "CSS: The Missing Manual". Google might be good enough to get you all the HTML resources you need, but this book really covers CSS much better than any web resource I came across.