If you have read some of my other articles I have advocated having your own blog on your own webhost. With that ability, comes customization.

Unless you want to shell out a lot of money for a good custom design, you are going to have to learn some web languages to get a good custom design. Even if you do hire a designer, what if in the future someday you want to make a modification? It is best to learn all this yourself to save you hassle and money.

Below is the languages you need to learn for Wordpress blogs hosted on your own web host. Other types of blogs may be different.

The first languages you should get a handle on is, obviously HTML and XHTML. Wordpress uses XHTML which is a standardized version of HTML.

The next you should learn is CSS style sheets. This is where you will editing the colors and other design properties of your wordpress blog. Luckily, you can usually just learn the most important basics by fooling around and adjusting things through trial and error.

Next should be the programming language PHP. Editing the design of the wordpress blog will include removing or moving PHP functions around. You don’t need to learn actual PHP programming, save that for programmers. You just need to know where functions start and stop and how to use \ before the ‘ in an echo, as to avoid causing a php error. If you have read some of my previous wordpress blog posts, you will see where I put in a advertising code block inside a php echo function. I then had to use a \ right before any ‘ inside the ad code or else I would get a PHP error and my site would stop working until it was fixed.