Web development best practices for state technology fair site

[dementedmuppet]

One of my professors helps with the state technology competition for students from elementary through high school.  The registration site for the schools, projects, and sponsors needs work. 

I've never done a website but want to tackle it and was hoping for input regarding which technologies are best suited to the purpose. 

The continuity of administration is a challenge.  It will likely be a different individual every year.  The last individual to attempt to update the site was hampered by incompatibility issues between versions of VB. I searched on the forum but I didn't find a thread that seemed to address web development best practices. 

I thought SQL and SOAP look promising and hoped for feedback.

 There didn't seem to be definitive information on Google and the feedback from the NANY project was great so I thought DC forum would be a good place to post

Current site
http://acte.aum.edu/state07/index.asp

[steeladept]

It depends a lot on where you currently are in your knowledge and what you are trying to do from what I know.  If you know pretty much nothing, I suggest you start at http://www.htmldog.com for an extremely good tutorial on HTML and CSS.  This is the core basis of the web and web page management.   Everything else (.Net, ASP, JSP, etc.) are all extensions (read here extending the limitations) of this basis.  Beyond that, I too am curious about what others feel.  I know a lot depends on the server and server extensions available, but if you are wide open, I see a lot of development coming from VB.Net/C#.Net on IIS servers.  C# seems to be the harder of the two to learn, but significantly more powerful due to the strong types from what I have read.  There are many others who can tell you much more than I, but if you are like me, you are looking for a quick answer, so here is a start 

[dementedmuppet]

Quick answers aren't a necessity.  It will be several months before the site needs to be operational since the last fair took place in April.

I've had some experience and prefer not to write in pure html.  We attempted SOAP in a class last semester but it was running Windows so it didn't turn out well.  It seems as though it would initially be a hassle, but would be easier to maintain in the future.  (Obviously, not on a Windows server, but Linux is an option)

Since we never got it working, I was hoping for input on other's experiences with SOAP, SQL, and the other web technologies.

The design tools for VB.Net are easy to use, but since the site has already had problems with that platform, it may not be a good idea for a site that won't have continuity of administration.