Hi,
My two cents:
It is advised to determine which Web technologies to be used before choosing
development tools, since you can always change tools relatively easy, but
changing web technologies may require re-do/learn the entire work.
To begin with, you should consider which web platform to use, and the two
most popular ones are: Microsoft-based (e.g. Windows Servers, .Net, SQL,
etc.), and Open Source-based (e.g. Apache, Java, PHP, MySQL, etc.)
In general, platform technologies include, at least, web servers,
programming language(s), relational database, etc. There are ample
information available on the Internet(or books), so you should have no
problems for finding related information.
When you determined the core technologies to use, you then can investigate
which tool(s) are more appropriate for your needs.
My view on MS products is that they used to have an advantage of more
integrated product lines from operating systems to office products to
development tools, but when they have grown beyond manageable, they couldn't
even come up a consistent single product, they have lost the advantage.
Besides, they are less complied with the standards (that is, W3C, for
example) and tend to bundle with other MS products. But then again, it's my
personal view.
This is a good place to start gathering information:
http://www.w3schools.com/
Hope this helps and good luck.
