Kitchen interfaces suck

If our computer desktops were designed like our kitchens, all the dock/startmenu applications and desktop folders would be unlabeled and identical in appearance. You'd have to keep opening different ones until you found the one you're looking for.

Perhaps our kitchen cabinets need transparency as much as our governments.

Building a simple web app

I have no background in web programming.

In my quest to build a picture-matching application, I'm learning a lot about it very quickly.

Web programming appears to be a world with a rapidly evolving interlocking set of programming languages and techniques. There seem to be a large number of ways of doing anything, but it's unclear what's best.

I have learned Python (though I'm still quite slow and my coding style probably has a heavy C/C++ accent).  I've learned enough about the Eclipse development environment to start writing and testing programs in it.  I've also learned the Flickr API.  At this point, I have a program that generates queries to Flickr, pulls down the results of the queries, and isolates the URLs of the appropriately sized pictures I want to use. 

It feels like I'm half done, but I know the other 'half' could take quite a while.

So I'm curious -- for those of you who do web programming, can you recommend a good introduction to building a basic modern web app?  I'd prefer something that lets me use Python for the backend, but I'm open to a wide variety of options.  Keep in mind I don't know anything about Ruby on Rails, AJAX, CSS etc so I should get a good global picture of web programming best practices before diving into the details.

My short-term goal is to be able to create an interactive app that presents picture pairs to users and records their votes of them into a database.  Once I get that working, I will gradually start adding new features.