In terms of ease of learning for someone with no programming skills, I say PHP, Ruby, or even Python. The community for each is large and not going anywhere. P

In terms of ease of learning for someone with no programming skills, I say PHP, Ruby, or even Python. The community for each is large and not going anywhere. PHP is a good intro language because you can easily run with it (build a simple site), it has great documentation, and the hosting is straight forward (thus it is easy to launch). Once you get more accomplished with you skill-set, you may get picky and want a more robust language, but 99% of the beginner type stuff can be done with PHP. Also, Javascript is great, you will use this regardless of the "server side language" as it is "client side" (in the browser). jQuery will help, as it standardizes many common and/or complex problems.