What’s the best way to teach myself web development and eventually earn money?

A good practical path is to choose one small goal and build it from beginning to end. For example, create a simple landing page, add a contact form, connect it to a basic backend, deploy it, and improve it based on feedback. Keep the project small enough to finish, then repeat with something slightly harder. A portfolio of finished, working projects will help more than collecting dozens of course certificates.

Start with the fundamentals instead of trying to rush straight into paid projects: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, followed by Git, responsive design, and a frontend framework such as React. Build several complete projects rather than only following tutorials, including the website for your startup idea. Once you can deploy polished sites and explain your code, you can start applying for junior roles or taking on small freelance jobs. Expect this to take consistent effort over months, not a few weeks.

Learning to code is still useful, but the valuable skill is broader than typing every line manually. You need to understand how applications are designed, how databases and APIs connect, how to test and debug, and how to recognize when an AI-generated solution is insecure or simply wrong. Use AI as a productivity tool, but make sure you can understand and maintain what it produces. Otherwise, you’ll struggle as soon as a project stops working.

Your startup website could be a useful learning project, but don’t make it your only project or wait until you know everything before starting. Build a simple first version with basic pages and clear functionality, then learn the concepts you need as problems come up. For earning money, also practice communication, estimating work, writing documentation, and working with clients—those skills matter just as much as the code.