BenBradleySmith's comments

$1000 is a huge amount of money for what looks like a very basic landing page. In my opinion it would be better to just shell out $150 for the designmodo's startup framework, http://designmodo.com/startup/ and spend an afternoon tailoring it to your needs.

https://laracasts.com is a website run by Jeffrey Way formerly head of web development at TutsPlus and a brilliant teacher. He has a number of lessons available for free at https://laracasts.com/tags/free including a series of lessons taking you through most of the basics (https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-from-scratch/episodes/1).

It's only $9 a month which imo is great value. I'd take a look through the free lessons and if you like what you see sign up for a month or 2 and start building.

In addition to this Dayle Rees has an excellent book which can be found at https://leanpub.com/codebright which takes you through all the basic stuff and more. I personally prefer Laracasts as I am more video inclined and Jeffrey is an incredible teacher but they are both great resources.

I really like the direction that Taylor has taken with Laravel in the past few months (Laracon). The creation of both Homestead and Forge will allow new users of the framework to quickly get started and removes many of the pain points that a lot of us have when starting out with web development.

If someone looking to start using a framework asked me which they should pick, I would recommend Laravel in a heartbeat. It has a friendly, active community, amazing resources to learn from (Laracasts and many books/articles) and now with Homestead and Forge it should allow a new user to get up and running in a matter of minutes.

I think that Taylor mentioned in the keynote that BitBucket support is planned.

Edit: Confirmation of Bitbucket/Gitlab support coming soon: https://twitter.com/laravelphp/statuses/468401873519915008