Web Development For Beginners
Let's begin with some basic web development terms.
What is a website?
Websites are files stored on servers, which are computers that host (fancy term for “store files for”) websites. These servers are connected to a giant network called the Internet.
Browsers are computer programs that load websites via your Internet connection, such as Google Chrome or Internet Explorer, while the computers used to access these websites are known as “clients”.
What does front-end mean?
Front-end (or client-side) is the side of a website or software that you see and interact with as an Internet user. When website information is transferred from a server to a browser, front-end coding languages allow the website to function without having to continually “communicate” with the Internet.
Front-end code allows users to interact with a website and play videos, expand or minimize images, highlight text, and more. Web developers who work on front-end coding work on client-side development.
What does back-end mean?
Back-end (or server-side) is the side that you don’t see when you use the Internet. It’s the digital infrastructure, and to non-developers, it looks like a bunch of numbers, letters, and symbols.
There are more back-end coding languages than front-end languages. That’s because browsers at the front-end only understand HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but a server at the back-end can be configured to understand pretty much any language.
Types of Web Development
How to write your website code?
Developers will use different coding languages for the front-end and back-end of websites, as well as for different functionalities of the site (such as design, interactivity, etc). These different languages work together to build and run your site.
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Let’s start with the most commonly-used languages.
HyperText Markup Language(HTML) has been used since the 1990s. It’s the foundation of all websites and represents the bare minimum of what’s needed to create a website. While it’s possible to create a website with only HTML, it wouldn’t look particularly attractive.
Languages like CSS and JavaScript enhance and modify the basic site structure built by HTML codes. HTML5 is the most recent version and supports cross-platform browser functionality, making it popular in mobile application development.
Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) was developed in the late 1990s. It adds design elements like typography, colors, and layouts to websites to improve the overall “look” of websites.
CSS allows developers to transform your website to match the aesthetic you envisioned for your site, and like HTML5, CSS is compatible with all browsers.
JavaScript is the cherry-on-top of coding languages. Created in the mid-90s, JavaScript is used to add functionality to websites. Developers use it to add animations, automate tasks within certain pages, and add interactive features that enhance user experience.
JavaScript is rapidly evolving. Once considered a “toy” language, JavaScript is now the most widely used coding language in the world. With the help of Node.Js, it’s now a back-end coding language. It’s the first language to be understood by browsers, and some have even discussed applying machine learning to it, too.
