What is PHP?

If you want to learn how to become a freelance Web developer, knowledge of PHP is an important part of making yourself a marketable commodity. PHP originally stood for "Personal Home Pages," and freelance Web developers today know it as a flexible server-side scripting language that allows interaction between the user and the website that uses PHP. To understand where PHP fits into Web design, look at its place in the scripting world. HTML is the basic structure that creates a static, unchanging Website. PHP is a command language that gives a Website the ability to accept a reader's inputs and let the Website respond to that input.

PHP is what allows a site to change. If you want to build an e-commerce site as part of a freelance Web developer job, PHP allows you to set up the shopping cart, calculate taxes and shipping and other features. PHP allows you to create photo albums or slide shows. Knowing PHP allows you to give today's customer what they want; a destination on the Internet that responds to a customer or reader in a variety of creative, fun to use ways. Today's web technology trends include demands that can be met by the features you can create using PHP or modifying the PHP already in use on that site.

Tags: Industry Trends, training, web design

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Design Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.