The two vital things you can help a kid with are: 1. Setting tasks that are within reach but will stretch his ability (and getting his buy-in on the idea befor

The two vital things you can help a kid with are: 1. Setting tasks that are within reach but will stretch his ability (and getting his buy-in on the idea before you start) 2. Teaching him how to find the answers to his own questions I'd do all the setup yourself so the kid can jump straight in to producing something. I'd use FTP as it's easy to conceptualize. Avoid the command line and version control. I'd start with HTML (written in Notepad) so that you can learn to present any data output. Just teach basic tags: h1, p, table, a href. Use w3schools for reference. Build something like a 'My Family' website with a page for each family member and links to the others. Then maybe stir in a bit of CSS - again just basic stuff (colors, borders, positioning) and again using w3schools for reference. Use this to make the My Family website a bit prettier. Then try some PHP/MySQL. You could save each family member in a table and use one PHP file to display each one based on an id specified as a get var. Simple project ideas to try after that could be a simple CMS or (my favourite) a very basic Twitter clone.