Garden Antiques For Sale

how do I learn to design a web page for a business with limited computer skills and web knowledge?

very basic skills, but am quick learner.
Would ideally like to learn how to display an informative site with photos, and how to make the site available to view

If you're a quick learner and motivated, do what I did.

Basic Page Functionality:

Visit www.w3schools.com and inhale the tutorials for html and css, and immediately start playing with the basic concepts. The great thing about this approach is you don't even need a web server, just a text editor (notepad, vi, whatever) and a web browser.

Once you've established a basic understanding of how HTML and CSS work (which shouldn't take more than a couple weeks) branch out into javascript. Again w3schools has excellent beginner tutorials. Play around with client-side scripting and Dynamic HTML techniques a bit, get a feel for what's possible with these techniques.

Once you've got basic page layout and simple scripting in the bag, start reading forum posts and articles, read other people's code snippets, hunt down example code for the kind of things you would like on your website and examine them. Refer to basic tutorials on the web until you understand how these code examples work. Being able to read other people's code is an invaluable skill and practicing this is an excellent way to learn how to do all kinds of things you may not have thought of. You may also consider checking out the forums at webdeveloper.com.

Design Basics:

Investigating a few beginner articles on color usage, palette selection, and basic layout is apt to have a huge impact on how professional your pages look. It's also a good idea to take a look at some of the things other websites are doing. Make a note of what looks good, what doesn't, and why.

Taking it to the next level:

Adding a server-side scripting language (PHP is always a good choice for beginners) and at least a basic understanding of working with databases are two powerful tools in any professional web developer's arsenal. It makes the difference between designing fairly flat content and being able to write full fledged web applications. Addmitedly this may be totally outside the scope of your current project, and if so, cheerfully ignore these as html css and javascript should be more than enough to get simple pages looking pro.