When you go online and want to learn programming, you run into the uncool assholes. The ones who’ll take "How to I make a web site that people can join" not as an admission of some guy who doesn’t care about the details but as a sign of weakness. I’ve seen responses to that question that range from "You obviously aren’t ready" to "It depends on how you want the site to scale." What bullshit!No no no. That's me, but it's not because of anything to do with spotting "a sign of weakness".
Let me try to use a non-car analogy: Imagine I'm a carpenter (I'm not) and you come up to me and ask "how do I build a staircase?". The kinds of thoughts going through my head might be:
1) A staircase is obviously wood, cut to shape, then fixed together. It's also obviously quite a big thing. There's no need to answer with the low level "obvious" things like "you will need a large workshop", if you want to build a staircase you probably already have woodworking tools and experience and now want a bigger project, so an answer telling you basic outline steps would be insultingly patronising and unhelpful.
Also, an answer covering enough steps from scratch would take far too long for a forum post or discussion reply, so if I make the judgement that you don't have any of the experience and haven't considered it at all then you might get a dismissive "with a lot of work" reply.
(OK, maybe if we met informally and you asked, you might be just making conversation, but nobody goes to a technical forum and asks how to build a website just to make friends, do they, so that doesn't apply).
2) On the other hand, if you have spotted the obvious then you're asking one question but meaning another - maybe what kind of wood can I use to make it look nice, what building regs must it comply to, how can I reinforce it, what fireproofing treatments work well? What styles of bannister were popular in Victorian times?
There could be a lot of fun stuff, but again too many directions to go in all in one answer - this is where you get the "it depends what style you want" answer. It's not bullshit, it's better than that, it's skipping straight to acknowledgement, acceptance and directed at whichever obstacle or major design consideration comes to mind first.
So, "how do you build a website that people can join" leads me to think something like:
A website people can join means giving them a form to fill in, keeping their details, and providing a login prompt later. This is obvious to anyone who has used a couple of websites with signup forms.
So either you understand the steps of a site you can signup to and would have Googled until you found out more about those steps and asked a more specific question (What's HTML? What's a webhost? What happens to information in a form once I click submit? How can I keep it around?), or you're really asking for design and obstacle avoidance suggestions, e.g. scaling, security, server load, etc.
Hence the replies: You haven't Googled for the basics, that suggests you aren't ready for the amount of work involved, or you aren't really asking such a basic question so you don't get a basic answer.