I know I could Google this all day, but I wanted to get some opinions from you all.

I have an idea for a web business start-up. However, I'm not a start-up junky or a web programmer. Most of my experience is in the C's... and a little javascript.

I want to do this all myself (no hired hands). The website itself needs a way to keep track of memberships and will be centered around a web-based designer that allows you to drop photos and text into an area.

What kind of languages should I be looking at to get started (considering the needs above)? Should I go with a CMS? What are the most modern (useful) web languages these days?

Thanks in advance for any help!

I know I could Google this all day, but I wanted to get some opinions from you all.

I have an idea for a web business start-up. However, I'm not a start-up junky or a web programmer. Most of my experience is in the C's... and a little javascript.

I want to do this all myself (no hired hands). The website itself needs a way to keep track of memberships and will be centered around a web-based designer that allows you to drop photos and text into an area.

What kind of languages should I be looking at to get started (considering the needs above)? Should I go with a CMS? What are the most modern (useful) web languages these days?

Thanks in advance for any help!

read about PHP and jQuery

Javascript. Look into the Closure compiler, since it sounds like you'll end up writing a whole lot of Javascript, and the Closure compiler/library will keep you organized and efficient (and type-checked). Your server can probably be just about anything you're familiar with. Some JVM-based language on Tomcat is a decent choice if your host supports it, and a regular LAMP stack works quite well too (we're using that for LucidChart, see sig). If you really want to play on the bleeding edge, node.js is pretty freaking amazing, though it won't scale up very well to large applications and multiple servers without losing most of its unique advantages (shared memory amongst requests, etc).

If you want to get something up and running fast to get interest (such as from investors) I'd definitely suggest looking into a CMS. If you're determined to do it yourself then you definitely need to learn javascript, or more precisely you need to learn about the HTML DOM because JS itself isn't a big deal. jQuery is the way to go but you'll also need to learn about CSS.

PHP could be worth looking at, equally Ruby on Rails or ASP.net... depends what you're most familiar with which you might like best.