incrediBILL - 5:54 pm on Jun 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

I would disagree that it's a bigger learning curve. I think overall it's actually LESS complicated than it used to be thanks to online services and all of the Open Source stuff currently available.

The only skills you really need are FTP. On many shared servers with control panels, you don't even need FTP skills as installing WordPress or Joomla is as easy as clicking a checkbox.

Buy a shared server hosting account, upload Open Source software, apply some free or paid template.

Done.

Remember the site Google Dances?

I remember going to actual Google Dances at the 'plex, those were a blast.

But now the skills required are far more numerous and each takes significant more effort to learn and master.

Really?

Linux is still my OS, Apache is still my web server, just 2.x vs. 1.x

HTML is still HTML, just HTML 5 instead of HTML 2

OK, CSS is a big change, but other than that isn't still just HTML and HTML 2 still renders in the browser in case you just want to be retro ;)

Even CSS isn't too daunting when you can grab something like Twitter Bootstrap and cobble together a completely responsive site that runs on anything from desktop to smart phone in less time than it would take to build a web page back in '96.

You just need to know you need Twitter Bootstrap is all LOL.

There are dozens of new script languages

Nobody cares except a few oddballs trying to show off how cool they are by using the latest and greatest crud that nobody has pre-installed on their server so any potential customers can't use it out-of-the-box anyway.

Javascript and PHP seem to dominate regardless of all that other noise.

All these years later LAMP still pretty much rules the web unless you're some corporate developer that likes giving money away to Microsoft for no particular reason.