I'm a college student and a freelance web developer! I would suggest first learning HTML and CSS, which are the backbone of all websites on the Internet. HTML is the language used to markup the website and CSS is used to design the boring looking HTML elements.

After learning HTML and CSS, you should learn the advanced features in HTML5 and CSS3. With HTML5, you can use cool techniques like video and audio integration as well as a canvas for drawing. With CSS3, the coolest feature included there is animations, so you can animate the entrance/exit of your HTML elements.

After learning those two, I would suggest learning JavaScript. Unlike the other two languages, JavaScript is a programming language and it teaches you the functionality of websites and how they operate. With JavaScript, you can learn an immense amount of things:

jQuery – this is sometimes better than CSS3. It's made for making websites cooler and more responsive. It has more flexibility than CSS3 in terms of things like animations. Though harder to learn, you can probably do much more with it.
Front-end frameworks – with different web frameworks, you can make web apps like Groupon's or there are also a bunch of more examples. Some of these frameworks include AngularJS, EmberJS, BackboneJS, ExpressJS, and ReactJS (the most popular ones).
Back-end frameworks – do you want to have a user registration system? do you want to store user data? NodeJS and MeteorJS are your best friend. These all run on JavaScript code, and are fairly easy to learn once you're proficient in JavaScript.


Of course, you can learn other frameworks for building web applications like Ruby on Rails or Python's Django, but in my experience. having both the front-end and back-end of a web application written in the same programming language will get you further.

Well now that you've learned everything, I would suggest making five to seven websites for some non-for-profit organizations or some clubs at your school that need a website. It's important to build up a portfolio of your work before charging for it, because people need to have a general idea of what you're capable of and what your style is.

by Shrey Desai