Playing with an arduino wemos (Esp8266)

I just got one of these to play with.
In my ignorance I thought it was a Esp8266 shield, turns out its a arduino based on the Esp chip.
I couldnt get the Esp8266 8 pin module to work properly, but the wemos works well, within an hour I got the wemos talking to thingspeak and an ntp time server.
Ultimately I want to make an interface for plant machinery so the machines can be monitored and maybe controlled remotely via the web.

I am doing similar with arduino project on a serial port to pc, preferably in visual studio, still not sure how im going to do a webpage that can listen on port and relay & store data , have you much experience with web programming, just wonder what software do you plan to compile webpage with?

Kinda.
Do some research on thingspeak, its a website designed for devices controlled by a micrcontroller.
You find a webpage you want data from, then you get thingspeak to translate just that data into another kinda webpage you can access with an api key, accesing that just gives you the info you want, its fairly easy to do, you dont need to be a network engineer to do it.
The wemos has everything built in, highly reccomended, I got really bogged down the bloomin Esp module, updating the firmware, using 2 serial ports and all that jazz, the wemos makes it all easy, look out for the R2 version, R1 is now outmoded.