Have you looked at
content management systems (CMS) for websites e.g.
Wordpress? A CMS provides a standard set of browser-based tools for implementing the flow and content of your website, often based on PHP and a database such as MySQL, together with some kind of templating system that allows you to design your own look-and-feel to suit your needs or those of your client. The actual content - articles, blog posts etc - is posted by the users via browser-based editors, which is much easier than editing HTML etc simply to add a new blog entry.
Many CMS platforms also offer a plugin mechanism, often with thousands of freely available (if not always reliable) plugins to provide extra functionality e.g. picture galleries, discussion forums, Paypal integration and much more, and there is also an admin interface that allows site administrators to do things like add/remove users with varying privileges, manage plugins, swap templates (themes) etc. Basically, you can spend more time designing your website and building content, and less time typing angle brackets. Many small web design businesses seem to rely on one or two CMS packages and then design custom CMS themes for their clients, which makes it much easier for them to support many clients on the same technology stack.
There are lots of CMS packages, including many open source options, but I think Wordpress is quite a good place to start if you're new to this, as it offers a lot of functionality, it's been around for quite a while so there are lots of excellent learning materials, free plugins and
themes, and it's easy to get started with. It's written in PHP, with the themes in HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP, and there is good documentation on how to start writing your own themes e.g. here's a
quick overview of how Wordpress themes work. This might give you a good opportunity to take your web design work in a different direction and explore the open source code of the CMS at the same time. Not all of this code will be good quality, but it should help you to get a feel for how these things work in practice. A CMS is inevitably less flexible than a roll-your-own approach, but it will often help you to deliver far more powerful functionality far more quickly than if you had to do it yourself.
But, as JKR says, be careful what you run on your machine and what you deliver to your client, and don't forget to check licence conditions for open source components you might be using in a commercial context. Keep your security software up to date (and there are security plugins for your CMS too), only download code from reputable sources and check for stuff that looks fishy. Wordpress itself is very widely used and can be secured via suitable plugins and the same measures that apply to any websites, but it has known vulnerabilities (like most popular software) so you need to keep your installation, themes and plugins etc up to date. Many web hosting providers will advise you on how to set up and secure your website and provide tools to help with this, although you'll probably still have to manage them yourself. If you're going to be managing websites for other people, there are also subscription services, such as
Sucuri which offer to monitor your website for security problems, although I haven't used these so I can't recommend this one way or the other. As with anything else, caveat emptor rules apply, so do your research before signing up for anything, obviously.
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