My mentality is that as long as you can present your content well to a vast majority of your users, you don't need the experience to be perfect for 100% of them. There is always going to be that one guy on IE6 and dial-up, but you shouldn't have to cater to his needs.

This doesn't mean aim for a really big, rich design that takes forever to load, it just means that you shouldn't have to compromise for the micro-minority.

About web development tips, read as much as you can about JavaScript and go with Node.js for the server. :D