If you are looking to build a website or just interested in exploring web developer skills, you need to get a basic understanding of Web Development field and process as a whole.
Web Development
Web development is a blanket term for everything related to building, programming, maintaining websites and web apps. While Web Design is concerned with the front-end, in other words, the visual part of the website, the Web Development is mostly focused on the back-end of the website, admin panel, database, and technical aspect of the website.
Web Developers
Web developers are IT professionals able to create anything on the web. These are web developing gurus able to build everything out of nothing.
While web designers are responsible for the website visual appearance, the web developers and programmers are responsible for how the website works and runs technically.
Keep in mind that there are different niches in Web Development field. The web developers is a blanket term for all professionals involved in website creation, including web designers, web programmers, front-end developers, back-end developers, flash developers, as well as web content and optimization specialists. However, we will talk about web developers in terms of website coding and web programming.
Web Programmers
Web Programmers convert web designs into real functioning web applications, web pages and websites. Professional web programmers have a solid expertise in programming technologies, web languages, and specialized web development tools. To make things function on the web, programmers write valid HTML codes, and have a great knowledge of PHP, CSS, (X)HTML, AJAX, Java Script, and other web technologies.
Using advanced technologies, practical expertise and huge brains, web developers build web applications ranging from online stores, business and e-commerce websites, social networking sites, web portals, and fulfill many other complex and complicated jobs in web developing. The following are just the basic jobs of the web developer.
Web Programming
Web Programming is writing the necessary code to build web applications. Programmers work behind the scenes to bring life to web pages and make things work on the Web. Website programming is mostly about non-design aspect of the site. Web programming is a part of complex web development process that involves using specialized programming algorithms and languages. Web programming is done with programming languages.
HTML, PHP, CSS Development
Web Development is impossible without writing high quality codes. Almost everything on the Web starts with programming. Using different web languages allows web developers to build web products and create all types of websites and web applications with top-notch designs and maximum functionality and compatibility.
HTML is the core of any web developing task. HTML5 (HyperText Markup Language, version 5) is the fifth revision of the HTML standard and new specification of HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1. Using HTML5 markup language allows integration of different kinds of media contents, images, forms, graphics, audio, video, animation, and other elements on a web page.
XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) is a part of XML markup language family. XML is an extensible markup language for encoding documents in a format that is readable by both humans and machines. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed XHTML as a strict version of HTML that combines XML syntax with HTML markup. XHTML allows for hypertext implementation and makes it easier to maintain and format web pages making them compatible with all browsers.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a style sheet language used to style and format web content written in HTML and XHTML markup languages. CSS defines layout of HTML pages, and covers fonts, colors, images, and other web page elements. Developed in 1997, CSS is compatible with all modern browsers. Style sheets allow web developers to improve content and give more control over the website.
PHP is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language and the most popular language in modern web development. PHP Programming enables web developers to create dynamic content and turn static pages into dynamic pages with great functionality and interactivity. Other dynamic and static programming languages include Perl, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, JavaScript, JSP, Java, C, C#, etc.
Web programmers are focused on developing web pages with high functionality. Developing a website is not an easy task, as well as finding professional web developers for your own website development.
Before developing website of your own, take time to discover more about who is who in website developing process and what is what in website building.
Don’t have a website yet? Oh, shame on you 🙂
