Web Development Basics

What is web development? Certainty helpful to know before anything else on the subject. Basically, web development involves using computer languages to build webpages. This is different from web design, which is designing what the webpage is supposed to look like. These are two separate fields, and businesses will often have employees who draw up the mock-up of the website and separate people who actually build it. However, sometimes people will take on both skill sets, especially if pursuing freelance work.

 HTML and CSS are essential components of any webpage. HTML creates the structure of a webpage, whereas CSS makes up the style. One analogy I’ve heard is that HTML is like a house and CSS is the paint on the house. This would be a great analogy if painting your house somehow took longer than building it.

These are both what are known as mark-up languages. Unlike programming languages, they do not execute any sort of script on the page. They just sit there and you can edit them to make things look cooler. To make things ultra-cool, you need to use a programming language. You may remember seeing annoying landing pages with Flash intros back in the day. Fortunately, Flash is going the way of the dinosaurs, and most front-end web applications are now built using Javascript.

There’s another important concept: front-end versus back-end development. Front-end involves the webpages you actually see, including many interactive elements on the page. However, when the website has to send information to a server, such as when you fill out a contact or registration form, this requires back-end development. Back-end developers deal with databases and programming languages such as PHP, SQL, Ruby, Python, and others.

I am currently training to be a front-end developer by learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Javascript frameworks. I also plan to study some PHP so I can have a better understanding of WordPress (WP). WP is a content management system (CMS), which allows anyone to easily add content to a webpage. A CMS is necessary so that clients can easily add content to their websites without ever touching the code. WP is great if you just want to build your own personal website or blog, but a web developer can give a WP website advanced functionality and aesthetics. I am learning WP because it is the most popular CMS out there, although I also plan to try out other CMSs, such as Drupal.

In a future post, I will walk through the steps for building a personal website using WP. This will require a web host and a domain name. A web host stores the file for your website, whereas a domain name gives you a URL such as the one you see on this site (elepalmer.com). There are many affordable web hosting services out there, and a domain name usually costs around 10$ a year.

I hope this post gives a better understanding of what I’m doing with my life now. Until next time!