I've decided I'm going to learn the skills to make websites with the hopes of maybe doing contract work one day. Currently I'm dabbling with Django, but I get the impression that most contract work is done in PHP. Why is that?
It's easy to find a PHP developer, since it's easy for almost anyone to produce functional PHP code. The most popular technology in the industry may not be the strongest in the long run, but it's best-known simply due to the number of people who can use it.
It's the VB 4-6 of web 2.0. You really CAN do very nice scalable, organized things with PHP. Most people don't, though, just like VB Classic.