Web-design Woes

Over Christmas break, as well as the past few weeks I have been updating sites for friends and family. The thing is, I wrote them all in HTML (all I was taught), and these people all seem to want to be able to edit their websites easily. Unfortunately, those over the age of 20 have ... more difficult time sometimes accessing servers and editing code. So rather than trying to teach them HTML (which might have been easier in the long run), I decided to update the websites. Unfortunately, what do I do? I was only taught basic HTML and CSS. I dont know HTML5 or CSS3, Javascript, JQuery, MySQL, PHP, AJAX, or anything else. What can I do with that knowledge? I decided to go with wordpress (sorry #blogger). Wordpress seemed like an elegant solution, as it had a wide user base and hundreds of plugins and themes. Little did I know that I would be busting my brains out this past month trying to work with it.... I started out thinking "This is easy!". That lasted for all about 5 minutes. Of course, my "clients" (I am all of 16, so I don't exactly have time, money, or the credentials to run a business), did not want their site layouts changed. So I tried to find a theme that fit best. I could find nothing. I searched on how to edit themes, and its all PHP. Something I do not know. So I get the "Thematic" blank theme. Seemed easy enough to edit the correct CSS files from the server. Well, I worked with that for about a week before realizing that it just was not going to work out. I needed something responsive, something future proof. That is where I am at now. At this moment, I am trying to create a responsive gallery page, complete with slideshow.. It is slow work, with a lot of queries as to the size of the screen and changing CSS based on that. But it is slowly working out. Maybe one day I shall show you the 3 sites I have created thus far. But, I have learned a lot about this, and I have learned a bit of jQuery, as well as the basics of PHP and how to create a custom wordpress theme. Well. Maybe I should start studying for finals... Yay PE final! (not)