The tittle says pretty much all. I think I'll have to work with html, css and php. Right now I have no knowledge on any of that. I learn reasonably fast and could spare four or five hours a day. I have some basic idea of programing logic in general if that happens to help.

By simple website I do mean simple, but decent/clean/not-completely-amauterish looking. The home, tour and examples pages of http://bigcartel.com/ would be an 11/10 in the scale of what I need. Creating any art assets with other tools like corel or photoshop or actually designing the thing shouldn't be much of a problem.

So yeah, I need to learn this as fast as humanly possible. If it can be done in a week, great. If in 3 days, awesome. It's not a problem if I have to cut many corners, I plan to go back to it all later, as long as the results are decent and code itself is reasonably clean. Any pointers?

Try using wordpress, easy, fast and free. You dont really need any programming knowledge or anything. This is mine just for the reference. http://roninsubs.wordpress.com/

1: Download notepad++
2: Follow tutorials on this site: http://www.w3schools.com/html/
3: Excell in the excellence you will become.

Well that order worked for me at least :)

That part has nothing to do with your coding skill, so, it's a none issue.

If you have general programming concepts already in place, it should be easy to pick up html/php.

Just google for what you need.

If you are willing to spend a few quid, the Head First series are good for beginners. I get asked a lot by friends as I work as a web developer and they have all found those books were an excellent base.

get a clean WYSIWYG editor like freeway pro 5.. build your site, then check the code to see what you did, learn from it, delete the WYSWYG editor and use notepad.. the clean part is important so it will write normal, clean css and html

Just had a look at your example site and you don't need php for the pages you mentioned.

Dreamweaver. Bang. Done!

I learned that software and made a website in a few days a couple of years ago. If you're a student at a university or college I'll bet they have computers with Dreamweaver on somewhere.

Depends what you really want to create. If it's a completely static site, you don't even need PHP etc. You could either do the pages with some website design software (like Dreamweaver) or do it the harder way by learning HTML/CSS. The latter provides cleaner and better code, but of course also requires you to learn quite a bit.

On the other hand, the days of completely static webpages are pretty much over. Almost every non-amateur homepage these days uses PHP (or some other server-side programming language), one or more databases etc. And since you say you are completely new to this topic and that you need to do this really fast, I would definitely NOT recommend trying to learn PHP and doing it with PHP. The reason is that it's not trivial to make PHP-backed websites safe and secure. And people completely new to PHP, trying to learn just the basics required to create a small website, are almost guaranteed to unconsciously make insecure websites (for example by being vulnerable to SQL injection).

Since you're practically starting from zero and seem to be in a real rush, I would personally recommend using a free content management system like Joomla (http://joomla.org) instead. That way you can easily create quite attractive webpages with modern dynamic features and there's very little to learn for doing so. To create a custom design for the page you will however still have to learn a bit of HTML/CSS. But I still consider this a promising strategy, because you get feelings of success very soon.

TOTALLY this 100% - That's a great site for EXACTLY what you need

Good luck!