Web Design
 

Want to build a WebSite using Linux. What is a good program to use for this personal challenge. I'm new to linux and also Web Design...

Do you already have a distro in mind?
If not, you could try out any of the top 5 or 10 at www.distrowatch.com
If this is going to be a publicly avail server or just avail to other people apart from yourself personally, then I'd go with a long term stable distro eg Centos (RHEL code but free).
The default webserver is apache http://httpd.apache.org/, highly recommended/used around the world.
For creating webpages, it's up to you. Some people just use a basic editor eg vi or vim, others prefer a more graphic approach, try Quanta http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/ or Bluefish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/.

You'll get lots of opinions, just try stuff out before you do any serious work.

I would seriously recommend using your distro's built in pkg mgr aka SW add/remove tool rather than downloading stuff off the web. Its safer (no malware) and easier eg will auto handle SW dependencies.

Re new to linux:

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html

Yeah, though if you're brand new to web design, check out XAMPP, it'll easily and quickly setup apache, PHP and MySQL for you but the program to start it all through XAMPP isn't 64 bit compatible so you'll have to use 32 bit, and really for the programming part just any plain old text editor. GIMP is also good for website graphics, though I'd imagine there'd be a better program for basic website graphics BUT idk lol it's a really good program.

Web Design
 

Thks for the info. I'm looking to use Suse on a older Dell pc. The finished site will be for a Medical Supply Co. and a update on a current site that's already online. The owner wants to maintain and update as needed. We've had some issues with the current admin. and it might be easier to take control.

I also recommend Bluefish, though recently I've gone back to Emacs (that's what I started out with way back) which does a good job too. I'm not quite as comfortable with it (writing HTML/PHP) as I am with Bluefish, but that's probably just a question of time..

I also use MySQL/Apache2, they seem to be quite common (both separately and as a combination). There are other database options available than MySQL, free of charge, but unless you've got a good reason (like 'I know something else already', 'there is something else in use already', ...) MySQL would be an easy route. I've tried XAMPP too, but I found it sometimes playing tricks on me -- the Apache and PHP versions were the same as on another computer of mine (but there installed the regular way, not XAMPP), but for some reason a PHP website would not run on the XAMPP server even though it didn't give any errors on the other setup..never figured out why, but if you're going to host a full website, I recommend doing it the "old-fashioned way" and not the "easy route" of XAMPP. If you're just testing the site and the production server is someplace else, then XAMPP might come in handy (at least easy to remove) if it works.

Good luck with your web design works, remember it's not black magic and there's plenty of helping material on the web (about the languages, server software and whatnot) and helping people here.