Monday 2 February 2015

What Is a PHP Template?

Websites have become a must not only for businesses but for many personal and artistic projects as well. There are many ways to create a website, from hiring a full-scale web development company, to doing it yourself by hand, to premade theme-based websites. Each of these approaches has its benefits and drawbacks, but using a PHP template offers the best features of all three.

PHP is a common coding language used to build websites. There are nearly 250 million websites built in PHP on over 2 million servers. These websites run the full range from visually intense to minimalistic, from animated to static media, and from blogging to e-commerce to simple informational pages.

While PHP Training in Jaipur is among the preferred coding languages for web developers, many users are not experienced coders and would not feel comfortable building their own website from scratch. And that's why the idea the PHP template was invented.

A PHP template is essentially a fully coded, full designed website that is missing only content (the words and pictures you want to include). All the PHP files are provided with the template, including any CSS (visual style programming), and are ready to upload to your server to make your site go live. But even better, because you have access to every line of code in the template, you have total freedom to change any aspect of the site you'd like to change: if the border is brown and you want it to be blue, you can do that; if you want the margins wider, or the header bigger, or to change the default font - you can do that.

Of course, there are a variety of platforms that offer customizable "theme based" websites, but many have very limited customization. Typically, when you buy a "theme" for a web platform you can only change the CSS, or visual styling, and have limited access to the underlying code. That means you can make only the most cosmetic changes. With a PHP template you can make deep-level changes to the framework and functionality of the website itself.

In other words, a PHP template provides more customization than a theme-based website, requires little coding knowledge and yet costs a fraction of hiring a professional designer. A designer can easily charge over $200 per hour, whereas you can buy a huge collection of PHP templates for less than $40.

Ultimately, the amount of coding skill you need to use PHP templates is up to you. If you want to make only minor changes or use a template as-is, you might not need any coding experience at all. If you're an experienced web designer you can use the template as a jumping off point and build something completely unique in record time. PHP templates are the most flexible way of building attractive websites.