PHP for Web Designers

(xylophone music) - [Voiceover] Hi, I'm David Powers and welcome to PHP for Web Designers. I've been using PHP, the most popular server-side language, to add dynamic features to websites for more than a dozen years, and I want to show you how PHP can make your websites more efficient. You don't need a programming background. I'll start by showing you various techniques through simple exercise files, with only a few lines of code. Then we'll take those same techniques and apply them to a website for a fictitious flower design company.

You'll move the site's navigation menu and footer to external files so they can be updated in just one place rather than every page. You'll also see how to process an online form, and display the results. The final project links the site to a database and shows how to display a series of related products in one page, and link to individual product details on another. There's also a chapter dedicated to helping you understand PHP error messages and fix whatever caused them.

Working with PHP requires a different approach from design but I won't bombard you with dense programming theory and jargon. I started using PHP to reduce a lot of the tedious repetition required by static HTML, and I want to share that knowledge with you. So join me in exploring PHP for Web Designers.