Developing Web Applications: frameworks

I know this may have been asked many times, but I read too much and I feel confused :)

Up to now, I developed web application mostly for myself in php interacting with Unix shell and Mysql/Pgsql. So, basically the code is "technical", meaning that the web pages do lots of things underneath but often prints an output string or nothing.

This is like when I learned C, I did lots with C but basically the console output was empty, I tried to learn C++ to interact with windows api but it was too hard; after some time I found out C# with SharpDevelop: now I'm able to quickly deploy good-looking applications without reinventing the wheel with a nice interface and without writing all by hands, thanks to the huge c# library and the capabilities of the ide to "design" the ui.

Now I'd like to do this step forward with web applications: now I'm writing all standard html by hands, using jquery to try to do something dynamic, without using css because it takes too much time to write all the styles for the dom components. Hence, I need a ide and a framework that let me to spend time to think what the application must do instead of wasting time to write all by hands. I tried also to look for new languages perhaps better than php (like java or ruby on rails) but in this way I'd need to learn that from the start: if it's worth it I'll do it but I'm not sure.

What would you recommend me? Thanks a lot, I hope I made myself clear.