Getting Started With Web Development

The internet has been around since the late 80’s. And with its invention, its popularity grew and so did the the number of websites in the World wide web. Businesses and institutions started putting their contents online, era of social media began, people started creating blogs and earning money. This led to web development being one of the most sought after professions in the world. And the great thing about web development is that anyone can get into it without a college degree. There are so many free free materials online that you can be a web developer from the comfort of your own homes.

But where does one start before becoming an expert in creating cool websites. First we must know that web development is not a single thing to learn. There are many things that goes into this process. For the sake of understanding the basics of a website, we can divide web development into two categories.

• FRONT END WEB DEVELOPMENT

  The front end is where the design of a website takes place. And that is where you get to flex your artistic skills. The front end developer must not only have programming knowledge but also know how to create a page that is appealing to their target demographic. Front end developers work mostly in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. To this day there are debates among people on whether HTML and CSS are programming languages. But Javascript on the other hand is in every sense a programming language and a pretty powerful one at that.
  HTML and CSS defines the basic layout of a page while Javascript is responsible for giving life to your webpage. By that I mean creating dynamic content on the page. Every cool thing you see on your page from changing colors to awesome animations, it’s most likely because of Javascript and its wide range of libraries. And once you get the basics down, it just gets easier from there. There are many frameworks available which will make the job easier. Bootstrap is one of the most popular design framework that combines HTML,CSS and Jquery. It gets the designing done with minimal amount of code, giving you cool animations that would take many lines of code otherwise.

• BACK END WEB DEVELOPMENT

  Back end is the portion of a site which you don’t see. But a lot of work goes to this none the less. Your site needs to continuously communicate with the servers. When you press send in a facebook message, the site sends your data to the servers, then to the recipient. Your account credentials are verified every time you login. A lot of programming goes in to accomplishing this stuff. And all this hassle is handled by the back end developer. It might sound frustrating but isn’t programming always?
  There are many programming languages to choose from. Among them PHP and Ruby are the most prominent. These languages are executed in the server side. Hence known as server side scripting languages. But these days there are frameworks available that allow you to create sites from many languages including Java, Python and C#.

So for the front end, a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS is a must. In the back end, it is recommended that you learn programming languages. However it does not matter which language you learn first because once you get the hang of programming, it is easy to pick up any new language.

But there is no shortcut to learning this stuff and don’t expect to be a master web developer overnight. It will take months, if not years of practice and a lot of trials and errors. And the good thing is that anyone with an internet access can learn this for free. There are some excellent content online that will make your journey easier and many people that can help you when you get stuck. Sites like w3cschoolsand tutorialspoint are a great place to start.