If you choose to pursue a career in programming I think you will find it is quite rewarding.
Before you write your first line of code, you should learn Coding Standards and Naming Conventions plus I highly recommend the YouTube channel on the Business of Programming .
I have been programming for over 30 years and a lot of people ask me about the profession of programming and how to start. It has been a great career path for me and I believe it is a really good opportunity for others.
For development and debugging I highly recommend FireFox Developer Edition. Learn it and you will be able to debug HTML and CSS issues much easier.
The basis of the web is HTML5 so you must understand HTML5 thoroughly. You will definitely also want to learn CSS. The basics are extremely easy and the power is amazing when it comes to look-and-feel.
After that my recommendations are PHP and MySQL.
I have worked with over 40 programmers over the years. Half had degrees from college and the other half were self-taught. All equally brilliant. Personally I do not recommend going to college to be a programmer. All the information is available for free on the internet and that way you can learn at your own pace.
While learning programming, and for searches in general, I recommend my new favorite search engine Ecosia.org (instead of Google).
Every search generates a little ad revenue and they use that to plant trees. It works just like Google searching… but does a good deed for the planet. And when learning a new skill… you’re going to do a whole lot of web searches!
Side note: if you cannot figure out how to make your browser change the default search from Google to Ecosia then you really should not consider a career in programming.
Start with Khan Academy to get all the basics of HTML5 and basic CSS.
Khan Academy has been around a long time. I have not used them myself but I hear good things about them. I can see they have grown a lot since I looked at them a few years ago. I don’t know if they charge anything - if so then look elsewhere first. If not, then jump in. From the little surfing I just did it looks like all their courses are still free!
This is the general page showing different categories of programming. For HTML specifically, check out: HTML-CSS.
There is a ton of great information on the web. Here are the websites you will probably end up getting the most of your answers and examples from:
I used to be a big fan of Bootstrap. Now I prefer MaterializeCSS. If you do download Bootstrap templates make sure you are getting the latest version and not an older version (get 4 and not 3). No sense in studying and practicing with older technology!
You should also download a good tool for writing programming code. I recommend Atom – it works with many languages and is free. Plus it has good color-coding and efficiency tools (their Snippets are fantastic).
This tool has add-on Packages you can freely download which greatly enhance the power and capability. FTP, SQL and many other capabilities!
However make sure you do not become too reliant on any tool that generates HTML. You must understand how the HTML works since later you will be writing code in a different language which generates the HTML.
Once you have ramped up your skills then check on these sites for finding some programming jobs.