Toloha

Lenovo is good and cheap. This is a nice model: LENOVO G50-30.

I know you said you lean toward a laptop, but INTEL NUC is a really cool desktop computer.

Lenovo <3 Same here, all of my machines

Do you have a good understanding of HTML? If no, start learning that first. Understand why you need css and how it is used to interact with HTML.

Also, try the 'inspect element' option in your browser and play around with that. That's how I started

EDIT: Also check out this

That's just awesome! I wish I was that handy... Could help save me a lot of money

Well... Google has some nasty tricks to get up high in the list, like using the Google Fonts web service, add a Google Analytics tracking code at the bottom of your page so Google can know more about your site visits, make your site load fast, use CDN's and things like that, and as emosaurusrex pointed out, use the basic guidelines.

Hope that helped.

I've tried linux. I've never goten used to the feel of it though.

Ubuntu isn't the only linux distro out there, hehe

But I think your project description is a bit unclear as gr3yh4m3 pointed out. In what language is it written if I might ask?