While I’ve taken a course or two that has introduced me to the basics of web design, I think I have really learned more in the past few weeks through starting this site and installing various WordPress themes.

When I started this site, I had virtually no knowledge of PHP. I think there’s really nothing better than playing around with someone else’s code however (and breaking it most of the time) to learn how to do something.

If you haven’t tried out WordPress before, you can set up a free account over at WordPress and try it out for free.

While there are many other tools out there that will allow you to set up a free blog, like Blogger for instance (the beta of the new Blogger offers you even more flexibility than was available in the original Blogger), it’s what you learn from setting up a site using WordPress that is quite valuable.

Let me also state that I’m not, nor have I ever been a web designer. As I stated at the top of this post, I’ve only taken a few courses on web design.

However, the key principle of learning to me with anything is always necessity. While it’s great to learn in a classroom, it’s even better to learn something when you have a real need to know it.

Having a real need keeps you focused like you wouldn’t be in a classroom. It’s too easy to drift off when you don’t have a specific applied purpose to your learning.

So if you haven’t tried it out already, go check out WordPress and set up a site. It’s easy, pretty fun (OK, maybe it’s more fun for me than it would be for most people) and you’ll learn a bunch of stuff you might have thought was really hard to do.

For more information on customizing WordPress, I’d highly suggest this post over at Tan Tan Noodles called “Customizing WordPress Templates”.

Update: When taking another looking around to see if anyone else felt blogs were a good teaching tool, I came across Micah Sparacio’s thoughts on using blogs to teach. Seems I’m not alone.