This is not an attack on you personally but I absolutely abhor the inner workings of wordpress and would thoroughly recommend against it for a beginning develop

This is not an attack on you personally but I absolutely abhor the inner workings of wordpress and would thoroughly recommend against it for a beginning developer. A much better approach would be to start a simple html/css based website and start abstracting out common elements, building a templating system, get content from a database, dispatch http requests with a front controller until you've got something that looks like an MVC based system. Then you start from scratch and do it again, learning from the horrible code you wrote the first time. Eventually you realize that a framework does it better than you and learn to use rails, zend etc.