It depends what you are trying to achieve, but acquiring a cms of some variety, then hacking on that is not a bad way to learn.<p>I&#x27;m not a web UI programmer, although have been at times over the years and still do some professional work in that space, but a little while ago I created a website for a friend&#x27;s business as a hobby project for me.<p>I chose to use Drupal, which is a php based cms, and used a paas called pantheon.  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pantheon.io&#x2F;docs&#x2F;articles&#x2F;getting-started&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pantheon.io&#x2F;docs&#x2F;articles&#x2F;getting-started&#x2F;</a><p>The good thing about this approach was that I had a fully functional site to start with, built with reasonably good practices (progressive enhancement etc), and I was able to hack away on it and taught myself some php as I needed to achieve certain things that weren&#x27;t available out of the box.  I found it quite interesting to dig around and see how they structured the site, particularly the css strategies.