I am a beginning Webmaster (relatively), with 2+ years of php experience. I also have some java training and a bit of .net.

My company is now close to redeveloping the website that I work on, which is coded primarily in php, but has some poorly-written .net in part as well (it's confusing and ill-planned, but I didn't make any of those decisions. Can anyone say action-oriented .net and JScript?).

So, I'm trying to decide which language I should learn next to quickly develop a new site. I will probably just redevelop it at first in php because I'm very comfortable with it. However, I'd like to migrate in the next year to something newer and more forward-thinking.

This being said, .net is out of the question a little bit. We need cheap developers who are fast and can get pages up quickly. In this part of the country, part-time .net developers are hard to find.

So, we need something that will be pretty standard in the next few years, but we have some .net SOAP 1.1 APIs that we use on our actual service (separate from the corporate website), that we will need to integrate part of the site with. Developing with php and SOAP is much more difficult than doing the same thing.

So, I may have to develop the API collaborative part in .net just to be easy, and then I'd like to use something else that is fast, flexible, forward thinking, and will be relatively standard and easy to find developers for. So, any ideas? Python and Django? Ruby on Rails? Another framework?

Thanks for your thoughts. Sorry, I know this was long, but it's all very convoluted and confusing so I needed to be slightly long-winded.