Best Way to Learn How to Build Websites?

I simply love Wix.com. The sites are just amazing. The templates are colorful, eye catching, and professional looking. I know there is a lot of concern about using flash sites like these, but Wix insists they are optimized to be read by Google spiders. The key is not to go crazy with all the animation and transitions so your site will load fast.

I'm sure others with more experience than me can speak to using flash sites like Wix, but if for nothing else, they make wonderful personal sites to share with friends and family--although Wix would beg to differ, I'm sure!

Just go to youtube and their are plenty of tutorial on their that will teach you how to build a website!

I agree that SBI is a great way to go, you can become proficient at it, and then start building sites for those who don't have time or don't have the inclination to build their own. They provide a lot of training, to help you become an expert.

I would recommend that you learn more than how to work with templates. The knowledge can come in handy in the future for many other things. Working with templates can be a faster option, but in many ways you're limited by what you can do and how you can do it. Being a web designer, I do not like those kind of limitations and neither do most clients I work with.

Learnable is an amazing site for learning the basics of most coding languages in video-style courses. They also tend to get in courses on the most modern techniques as soon as the become mainstream. I've taken some great ones from them, including an HTML5 and CSS3 course...both of which were very helpful and guided you step by step WITH suggestions of free tools to use for your homework and following along. They also have forums for you to ask questions related to each day in the course.

Learnable was developed, I believe, by a larger site called Sitepoint. They tend to offer their courses more in book and ebook format - still very helpful. So you have the option depending on the style of learning you prefer.

An easy DIY way to start playing around with CSS and HTML and some of the more development-based languages is to purchase some cheap hosting and grab a few wordpress themes. You can find some great free ones and even the paid ones aren't too expensive. That way, your only monthly cost is hosting (which you can get for like 4 or 5 bucks a month if you know where to look). If you're just learning, I wouldn't recommend paying significant monthly fees for anything.

I also recommend doing some research on website usability. Both Web Pro News and Website Magazine are great resources for that. It's important, whether you're building sites for yourself or others.

Some essential tools for DIY website design courses:

Filezilla (free FTP service for accessing your site)
Jedit (free editor for HTML, CSS and other development files)
Firebug (Firefox add-on for inspecting, editing & monitoring HTML, CSS & Javascript)

Hope that helps!