If you are new to PHP, then a couple of good projects to start with would be a personal profile page, and a contact form.
First of all it will give you some motivation because you would be programming your own web page to tell people about yourself. Secondly, you would be giving them a way to contact you. Mostly, because most of the skills you will want to learn in order to create websites, will be wrapped up in those two components.
Creating the personal profile page will give you experience with basic html, styling, plus you can start learning about PHP basics like using control structures and data structures. You could then move on to connect your profile page to a database and get all your information from a database.
The contact form will help you upgrade your skills because not only will you learn about making forms, but you will start to make your website interactive. Eventually, when you have improved your skills, you will spend a lot of time working with forms to update your database, giving you the ability to manage website content via the internet.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. There is a whole lot more to learn.
If you interested in upgrading your skills, or getting started, feel free to contact me.