Learn Basic CSS and PHP. It’s Worth It

Published on: Dec 14, 2009 @ 11:04

Web 2.0 tools are wonderful for helping you avoid most of the headaches involved with intricate coding and letting you focus on the content and appearance of your blog.  And when you first start running your blog, this is a good thing.

But after a while, you’ll want to start tinkering with your blog, to fine tune its performance and appearance.

If you’re using a self-hosted WordPress blog or Blogspot blog or any blog where you have access to the source files that drive the appearance and the performance of the blog (the themes and plug-ins, in WordPress language), then you have the ability to change just about any aspect of the blog, from the colour of the text, to the underlining of the hyperlinks, to the background, to the images in the header…it’s all within your control.

But you do have to know what you’re doing.

There are two primary coding languages that drive blogs:  PHP and CSS.

PHP

PHP is a scrambled acronym for Hypertext Pre-Processor language.  It’s a scripting language that is at the core of all blogs and most dynamic webpages.  It is deceptively simple for the effects it achieves.

CSS

CSS is also an acronym, for Cascading Style Sheets, and these are the sheets that determine how a webpage will look. They work hand-in-hand with a PHP-scripted page, which has a command at the top of it, telling it to look for the CSS sheet.  The CSS sheet lays out the webpage, determines fonts, backgrounds, colours, etc.

There can be several CSS sheets for a single page or set of pages — one for normal monitors, one for mobile devices, one for vision impaired reading devices — and each CSS sheet changes the layouts to suit the devices and receivers…the list is potentially endless, although not all designers build multiple CSS sheets.  Usually one sheet is built per set of pages.  But if you’ve ever wondered how Google managed to squeeze its browser down to perfectly suit your smartphone screen the way it does, that’s how — Google has a CSS sheet built for held-held devices.

Learning the Basics

You don’t have to learn all these advanced techniques to be able to tweak your own blog.  Intermediate beginner skills will allow you to take a free WordPress theme, for example, from the supplied standard theme:

This is the Branford Theme by Michael Oeser, a magazine style theme which is an advanced theme to begin with – you need to know a bit about coding just to install it.

But once you know the basics about CSS and PHP, you can start playing around with the theme for yourself, and come up with different looks:

These blogs look quite different from where the theme started out, but all that was involved was basic edits to the CSS sheets and PHP scripts.

How to Learn CSS and PHP

There are any number of Dummies and Idiots guides for CSS and PHP, and while you may feel foolish reading them, these really are some of the best starter books around for the ground-zero, know-nothing primer on a subject.

One of the best on-line authorities is the W3Schools.com, which offers a full on-line reference for those who already know PHP, CSS, Java, HTML, XHTML and more, as well as tutorials for the beginner who wants to teach themselves the basics in any of these languages.

Any bookstore and dozens of websites offer resources, books, e-books and more that will teach you these languages — sometimes promising to bring you up to speed in a few short hours.  It’s often possible to pick up the basics very quickly.  Both languages are fairly simple at their core, and it’s worth spending the time learning the basics in order to be able to make the changes to your blog that will make the difference between good and great.

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