Ask HN: What's the best way to create a web app the first time?

I have a confession. I feel like I am cheating. I have been slaving away at this web app concept I have for the last few weeks, but haven't been making as much progress as I want to.

I did CS in college, and am familiar with the web, but I have never built a web-app from scratch. I can understand most programming languages, and most markups, but since I never went into a programming job right out of college (and never really had much motivation to do it on the side) I don't know how to build something from scratch completely.

I have been trying to 'tried and true' way of just sitting down and struggling and it has been very, very difficult to stay motivated. Whenever I come across a problem that Google doesn't help me solve, I post a question to some tech help site (like stackoverflow) and that helps me much. Sometimes I read through reference files and figure out the problem.

When I do figure it out, it feels like I scored a winning touchdown in the superbowl (especially if I have been struggling with that one problem for days).

I am tempted to use jQuery plugins to help me do what I need to do, but to be honest I feel like I am cheating.

Maybe it is the college mentality that is forcing me to not want to re-use any code from anyone else (it took me about 2 weeks to convince myself that using jQuery was fine). It sounds stupid I know...but I guess I have just always done all of my work from scratch and so doing it any other way right now is so hard.

So my question is, do you have any tips about how I can go about building my web app (given that it is the first time).

The UI functionality I am trying to build is like a hybrid of many functionalities I have seen in many places (popular sites as well as not so popular ones), but I feel like by viewing their source and taking bits and pieces I am stealing :(

Do I just continue doing what I am doing, but how do I stop myself from feeling like I am annoying people with always asking questions...because I have ALOT of questions.

I am feeling very conflicted right now, and discouraged to be honest...but I KNOW that if I can get this thing to be the way I want it to be, it will solve a very specific pain problem that many people face.

By the way, everything I am talking about is just getting it to some form of a minimum viable product. But I am still struggling :(

Help!