Anaconda

What are the programs you must learn in order to do a search website, such as Yahoo or Facebook. Can someone please give me the complete list of programs and design programs that I need to learn to design a search engine and a website design?

rossng11

HTML
CSS
MySQL
PHP
Javascript
possibly:
XHTML
XML
Ajax

Kang Oedin

First things first. You need to know about HTML because it is the heart of the web. Why? Because the browsers or user agents (using the W3C term) such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Opera and many others only speak of one language, HTML. But now you don't need to know well everything about HTML, since there are many visual web program such as Dreamweaver, Microsoft Frontpage, CoffeeCup and others.

Second, you will need to know about CSS (cascading style sheets) to 'decorate' your pages. Why do you need to learn about CSS? Because it is some kind of wrapper or function in a programming language. With CSS you don't need to define the format of every element. Just use CSS and you are ready to go, you only need to code once and can be used many times.

For example, you may want to format a h1 (heading 1) tag with red, bold, size 20 point and center. In the CSS you define a format like
h1
{
color: #ff0000;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 20pt;
text-align: center;
}
and all your heading 1 tags will be formatted as red, bold, 20 point and centered.

Thirdly, you must learn the scripting language. There are lots of them like ASP, PHP, Python, Perl. I use PHP most. These scripting languages can be used to make dynamic pages especially for search website. When we use HTML, we only make static pages. With scripting languages, we make dynamic ones.

Fourthly, you need to learn about database. And again, there are lots of them like MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB/2, Postgre and their other friends. These databases are used to store data. Why? Because databases are fast, can have relations between tables and can store very large amount of data. Since you are developing a search website, then you will need a database with some tables to store the site stats so when a user searches something on your site, the database will show the results as required.

Last but not least, you will need a web server, both hardware and software. You can always hire a web server from a web hosting company. There are many hosting companies such as http://www.lunarpages.com/id/kangoedin that will host your site. Every web server is always equipped with a web server application such as Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Services and many more.

I hope it helps.

UnknownFury

You'll need a program such as photoshop to do the design side.
Then to code it all you'll need to learn:
HTML
CSS
MySQL
PHP

w3schools.com will help you learn those. Good luck.