Due to recent a recent accident that might put me out of my professional waitering career....believe me there is such a thing, currently 5 star hotel head waiter.
I was wondering where is the best place to learn how to build and design professional websites...can anyone suggest any online courses or something, as I don't have a clue...have the ideas as they say, just not the know how.

hmm, there arent really any such courses available, there are plenty of places that will claim to be able to teach you, but they are basically pish.

You need to go to college tbh, that's what i did
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yeah i had a feeling it might be that, of course the catch 22 is there, that going to college kinda messes up your income...

Yeah definatly teach yourself, the internet has thousands of self help places, development sites you can use

A lot of web design stuff you can teach yourself but I wouldn't recommend teaching yourself something like PHP if you have never done programming before, you will get into bad habits. It's a weakly typed language but if you want to do anything else programming wise in the future the bad habits you pick up teaching yourself will come back to bite you.
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If you were to ask google (your best friend on the internet) http://www.google.co.uk for those who dont know it!!!, you will find millions of sites to help with learning to write html, css, javascript, php, sql database.

As a starting point go back to school (FREE) - http://w3schools.com/

Andrew

Get a hold of Dreamweaver (I think that's the name) It's a what you see is what you get kinda thing, but you can also look at the code it generates on the fly. It's kinda cheating as it makes ya look better than you actually are to start with, but it can help you figure out how things are done.

i am starting evening classes in web design soon. i know enough to get by on so far as i own a couple of websites myself, and built those but i really want to start building my IT skills up a bit now and thinking about a change of career within the next 5 years. php is also on the list of to do things.

get hold of this:
Lynda.com - Photoshop CS2 for the Web Essential Training and cs2 and some free templates from here: http://www.templatesbox.com/templates.htm
and free photos here: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

if u wanna learn stuff go here: http://www.w3schools.com/html/

its better to learn how to code html first b4 you get into dreamweaver. That way when stuff goes wierd and trust me it will, you got some idea about what's going on.

iu want to experiment with php/mysql use http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl.

I'd like to learn SQL inside out!

first - and I say this to all newbies to IT because I'm a cranky old techie git! Learn to play with 'C' pointers! I found it easy peasy 'cause I'd taught myself Z80 assembler <smug grin>

Now for serious reply, have you considered the Open University? They have 6 short courses, all on a different aspect of creating web stuff from the front end to server-side and together give you a qualification.

Ok not strictly web design but if you learn it properly from the ground up, and don't presume there's a 'quick fix' your more likely to succeed...