What technology should I use for building my website and what are the best resources for it?

The first thing to recognize is that your vision will change as you progress through your project, so it's important to pick something that is both robust enough to meet your demands, yet flexible enough to iterate without causing major headaches. For this reason, I would steer away from major frameworks like Ruby On Rails, or Drupal, for your initial foray into the web world. Yes, they can deliver rapid results, and they can also deliver massive headaches.  Get the basics down, Javascript, jQuery, PHP, MySQL. Everything else grows from that basic understanding of front and back end. You can use this education to inform your choice of technology in the future. Firebug is your best friend. Learn about POSTs and GET's, learn how to pass data between the web layer and the database layer, without refreshing the page.  I echo John's sentiment above, steer away from the large, expensive tech stacks. Compare the documentation for .NET (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w0x726c2(VS.100).aspx) versus PHP (http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php). Especially look at the important bits, code examples and community. PHP has a rich community versus the dead zone that is the MSDN.

Hi there, Now, since you say you are developer & need to build a site that can be scaled. I suggest you to develop sites using Drupal CMS. It has lot of advantage to it. HTML5, CSS3, Ajax, Javascript, a lot of support is already available. Check out my answer here - Also, I have explained here http://www.tech-magneta.com/freelance-drupal-development. Please expand the points for description) Creating a site from base coding level will take a lot of time. Whereas, with drupal & its huge community you wont have to reinvent the wheel of coding. Basic functionality like Login- Authentication is in-built Creating user roles & assigning them permissions is easy HTML5-CSS3 responsive theme are available now. Functionality that you need may be avilable most probably in form of contributed modules. Just go through the main http://drupal.org site & you will know. Or may be google your functionality requirement by typing - "drupal [followed by needed functionality]" & you will get most of the answers. Drupal is secure, highly scalable, can be used developed, sustain & maintain overtime. Hope this help. Regards, https://about.me/AniketMohite

Most any technology that's in widespread use will do what you need. While there are many who might suggest that one platform is vastly superior to the others, I don't think it's the case. If I could suggest one route however, it would be to move in the direction of open source. You'll be free of expensive server and development software licenses, and it provides for a healthy balance between controlling your project's future, but still having a healthy network of support. As such, I'm a big fan of projects like Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Mongo, etc. For your rich frontend, Javascript and HTML5 is quickly becoming a great solution.

Since you haven’t yet get in depth in any WEB programming language you have some options: Use Js for all, use any Node.js framework for the server side and use something like AngularJS (specially since Ng2 is in RC1 at the moment of writing), it’s easier to write when both your server and client are in the same language. Use Rails, it comes with lots of benefits, remarkable ones are sweet dev ecosystem, easy to integrate testing, database versioning, easy deployment to some platforms like Heroku, already configured for protecting you from most security issues (off course including SQL injection, XSS, CRSF and all), but you will lack a bit in the UI front unless you manage to integrate with a front-end framework. Use both Rails and AngularJS with Rails 5 API mode, the new standalone Action Cable package to import it in the Angular 2 app to be able to use WebSockets, and Angular itself is awesome flexible for UX (Plus the benefits of #2). Use php (not really, almost all legacy code and learning resources are spaghetti code), php is not bad, but there’s better, if you’re going to use php, you’re better suited using JS since you will use it anyway if making an UI rich app.

If you've not got exp with php, js (but would like to!) - how about starting with something simple like Wordpress? It has huge amounts of online resources - and you can play around with free themes and plugins just to get an idea of how bits of functionality would work and fit together. All without wasting too much time trying to grapple with more complicated DIY apps! I wouldn't recommend Flex or Silverlight for a normal "site-type-site" (accessibility is a thing).

First, what languages are you proficient in or what do you feel most comfortable working with? It sounds like you want a CMS with file transfer capabilities built in. I would find a CMS package with everything that you want, that is built in the language you are most comfortable working with. You may look towards something like Joomla, Wordpress, or Drupal in the PHP world. You may want to go with something else like DotNetNuke, Umbraco, etc. if you are not comfortable with PHP.