What is web development? It’s the complicated side of web design.

I’ve designed several websites, so I have the design part covered. I’ve also built most of the sites I’ve designed, so I have a smattering of development thrown in there for good measure. However, for most developers out there, development is the serious, non-design, very technical side of things — writing server-side scripts, etc., dreaming in PHP and Perl.  I still dream in HTML and CSS.

Got some catching up to do!

Consequently, I don’t have a whole lot going on the web development side of things currently,  although I am working on building these skills. My goal is to learn PHP (better late than never) as I want to be able to pick apart, and put back together again,  the WordPress and Joomla websites that I have worked on for clients.

It’s all well and good to be able to design and make a site look pretty, but want if I have to move an element? I’m stuck on that.  So my evil master plan to get unstuck.

A place to start for me, well, actually, it’s more of an end-goal, is to be able to build and design a Word Press theme. First, I have to learn PHP. So, I recently installed an Apache server on my local machine, along with MySQL, PHP and a local install of Word Press. I was quite proud of myself although I ran into several snags along the way. Thanks to hunting around in forums, I was able to get it working.

I’ve written my first few lines of PHP code, my first variable, as well as a variable variable.

Stay tuned