How many of you actually..

I agree.

I only know how to set up websites from scratch with Wordpress. It only takes like 10 minutes.

I second this. Play around in the appearance editor and you will get the hang of it eventually. Once you get proficient with PHP, the REAL fun with Wordpress begins !

I do. Wordpress is fine for some uses, but sometimes you want something special (or simple) and Wordpress is the wrong tool for the job.

HTML is very easy to pick up and, as has already been said, Google is your friend. There are only a very few tags that you'll need to learn.

CSS is equally easy to understand once you get your head around the basic principle of it - that HTML is about the structure of the page, whereas CSS is about how it looks. There are also websites explaining everything you could ever need.

PHP is brilliant, but not strictly necessary. It is good for adding interactiveness to your pages - and necessary if you want to pass information from one page to another, or to a database, but for most simple web pages it won't be needed. The good thing about PHP is that you don't need to learn the whole language in advance - just the bits of it that you need at the time. That way your knowledge will grow gently.

JavaScript (or jQuery) can also be used to create some excellent special effects on your site but you probably don't need to set out to 'learn' it in advance. There are thousands of code examples online (need a countdown timer - Google javascript countdown time and you'll find lots that are free to use).

The more you build web pages, the more you'll pick up as you go along. And have a lot of fun along the way.

Martin