Website Development using WordPress
Many of the industry leaders in website development began as DIY developers using the WordPress content management system. WordPress offers a great platform to start out in website development as it offers a huge online community, easy to understand coding and enough reference material to help you along the way.
What you need to know to use WordPress
WordPress is manipulated using the same major languages that most websites are developed with (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and it is built using PHP, the most common web programming language. As a beginner, you can easily create a bespoke website design with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS which are used to construct the layout and style it.
Although you can produce reasonable results using the basics of HTML and CSS, it will take a lot longer before you become familiar enough with the full range of capabilities available with (CSS in particular) code writing.
PHP
PHP is a server side language which means that any actions get executed on the computer that you requested it from and not your own. The results of the action, are forwarded to your browser and this is what gets displayed on your computer.
PHP is used to produce major operations within your website including creating passwords, login pages, image galleries, form creation, surveys and more. As the most popular scripting language on the web, it has become an essential skill for working within the web design/development industry.
HTML
The HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is what a website is built from. HTML transforms a plain text file into a webpage which holds the content of a page and details about the structure. The HTML Tags describe to a browser how the page will be formatted. HTML is created from HTML Tags that are used to indicate where specific elements are placed such as headers, paragraphs, lists, links, tables etc.
CSS
CSS has become an essential skill to master for any web developer. CSS ( Cascading Style Sheet)
offers a web designer control over the look of a website so that it can be rendered to suit any design requirements that differ from the browser defaults.
A cascading style sheet offers a layer of style instructions on top of the previous style sheet starting with the browser default styles. Each successive CSS file read by the browser will overwrite any previous instructions.
Using A CSS style sheet allows a website developer and their team to easily manage and update styles throughout an entire website with a single change. Style sheets offer a convenient way to take control of your website elements (HTML) by targeting a HTML tag, ID or Class and changing it throughout the web page or the entire site, offering a time-saving option to coding each element individually in the HTML.
Javascript and JQuery
Javascript is used by large numbers of websites as the most powerful and convenient way to add interaction to a website. The Javascript instructions are used by the computer of the user and therefore there is no need to download these features from your website.
Most web browsers support Javascript and most website users have Javascript enabled so that they can take advantage of these interactive elements of your website. There are many online libraries which provide Javascript code written to perform a required task .
JQuery offers website developers a range of shortcuts to allow easy use of the Javascript language. Using JQuery may require some basic Javascript understanding but it can get you results quickly saving you time and effort required to create the Javascript code from scratch.