Is It Hard To Make A Web Site? (new member)

[ericfromoc]

Hello, everyone. I am a new member :) Good to be here. I have a degree in computer engineering, and sadly of late I got hooked with ASP.NET, which I was never trained for. Web programming looks so fun! Um, basically my question is, Is it really hard to code/launch sites like facebook or myspace? Of course not the whole package, but the basic capability such as login, access to database, retrieve and display files pertaining to the user, etc. I mean, that alone seems Ok, but then it seems like I've got to worry about cookie, session, protocol and so many other complicated things. I am asking this because I have a web site idea and wants to make it happen, but quite frankly it looks daunting. And all these guys who created YouTube, myspace, or facebook are geeks and I am not. I do have years of objected oriented programming experience(Java) so programming is not new to me at all, but I don't know if it should mean that I CAN DO THIS within months or so. I don't know if I am looking for encouragement here, I guess more like reality check. I don't have anybody to team up with. No geeks around me. Am I doomed unless I can conjure up some money to pay distrustful people to work for me? What would you do if you were me? Urgh... sux. I am studying tho :P Thanks in advance for your replies. Well appreciated. Please be nice :)

[gits]

hi ...

this is quite a question ;) ... it depends on your abilities to learn and your will to fail sometimes at the start ... but let me tell you how i would describe the typical learning curve (in case your target is a professional-like knowledge): first you start with a wysiwyg-editor to create some html-pages ... (in case you would like to speed up your efforts later on - avoid that and use an text-based editor that has html-syntax highlighting) ... don't forget your java-experiences and always try to seperate layout and styling ... so the same time you start with html learn css too. now play around with it and install Firefox and its firebug-extension - make all your initial tests with it ... when you know the HTML/CSS-things quite good start to use JavaScript and go through some DHTML-tutorials. now try it in several browsers ... IE, Opera, Safari, etc. and learn that your code may not work as expected with all that browsers ... but now you may learn to code cross-browser-like (regarding javascript and css) ... and now you have the knowledge about the clientside things you need. now ... since you want to use ASP.NET ... i recommend you to do the steps i mentioned above ... because you certainly will use visual studio and that will hide all that things from you and since it is ms-stuff it might be tricky when you need tricky things for your page that has to be coded for different browsers and is not provided with visual studio. now start to make pages that are database-driven ... and try to combine your clientside-knowledge and may be some of your created examples with database-requests ... since you know already what a node's id is what styles you may set to hide or display elements, how a table is constructed with html etc. you could easyly adapt nearly everything that you need ... since you are no longer bound to the standard controls that are provided for you and that makes the difference between standard pages and custom pages ... you could do the cool ones ... the customized ones ... the ones with cool transition-effects, perhaps make ajax-calls instead of postbacks etc. ... you have the time to learn the slick new web2.0 techs that are known for long but you could avoid all the faults and boring page-reloading-serverside-coded webapplications ... but for that ... you need to know a bit more then ASP.NET ... you should know the mixture that might be used for modern webapplications ...

so i hope you have enough time for learning ... and since you know java you should be able to learn the webthings quite fast ... i promise ;) ... the difficult and tricky things are those browser-specifics, the right way to seperate one step from another, seperate clientside code from the serverside one, using the best technologie for the purpose, and when using ajax to understand the paradigm of async data-flow ...

kind regards