Contents
What is website development?
Web development encompasses various activities, including web design, programming, eCommerce development, and network security. Website development indicates the effort that goes into establishing a website. This might be anything from a simple plain-text webpage to a complex online application or social media site. Unlike in the past, when the primary emphasis of web developers was to provide as much material as possible, web development today allows them to add additional aspects to their websites. The current focus is on improving the websites. Today’s web designers aspire to create more aesthetically beautiful and interactively smoother websites than ever before. The purpose of making the websites interact smoothly and to allow the user to have more:
- Personalized user experience.
- High user engagement.
- Fresh contents.
- Positive experience.
Why is Web Development Important?
The internet has unquestionably altered the globalisation of business. People and company owners are far more linked now than they were two decades ago. Enterprises are moving away from nation-states and toward a more globalised world. It revolutionised the way businesses sell themselves. The significance of having a website in the promotion of your products and services has risen dramatically. We can’t ignore that apps dominate the chart, indicating a change in online engagement towards social media use.
Nonetheless, any firm that operates online needs a strong web presence. When individuals are looking for information about a company’s legitimacy, they first look to its website on the internet. The website has proven to be a vital tool to communicate with clients.
The construction of your website forms the initial impression of your company. It enables you to create businesses that are tailored to the demands of your target market. You may bring consumers from all over the world and spread awareness to as many people as you wish. It’s also your digital sales representatives promoting your services 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Types of Web Development
Mobile Application
More and more businesses are investing in mobile apps to engage with customers on the go. A mobile app is often designed simpler version than the main website. The mobile-friendly site offers most of the same things but is built to work well on smaller screens.
Mobile app development is the building of an application that can be downloaded and installed onto a mobile. The apps typically provide a specific function that’s not as easily accomplished on a web browser. They’re integrated with common smartphones features like the camera or GPS.
Cybersecurity
Hackers do not have a typical desk job. They work whenever they want and take advantage of others. They search for vulnerabilities in websites that the developers are unaware of. Many companies only consider security on their application as part of the assurance process after their software has been entirely created towards the end of the software developed lifecycle. Teams may be using Agile, Waterfall, SCRUM, test-driven development, continuous integration or several other practices while releasing new software. But whatever methodology is used, hackers can always break down the software. That’s why developers work on the software separately that prevents hackers from breaching on a website or software.
Front-end Development
The front-end development of the website includes the display of the website. It’s the look of a website’s user interface, consisting of the text, buttons, pictures, and views that appear on your screen as you interact with it. Front-end development is the process of creating interactive interfaces. Consider when you’ll need to make a cash withdrawal. You don’t just walk up to a stack of cash and grab everything you can since it would be against all banking regulations. In banking, an ATM serves as an interface to guarantee that you only withdraw money from the proper account.
Front-end code organises and makes information from a server available to clients.
- Maintaining good web speed performance to improve user experience and search engine crawlability is the front-end developer’s job.
- Ensuring that the website is mobile and tablet friendly.
- Working on a cross-browser problem.
- Ensure that the HTML is appropriately formatted.
- SEM (search engine marketing)
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the three main languages used in front-end development.
Back-end Development
It’s the development of the system that goes on behind the scenes. A back-end developer produces components and functionalities that a user accesses via a front-end programme or system. It’s similar to storing and organising data and designing algorithms and complicated logic to make the front-end operate.
If the static website’s front-end developer handed it over to a back-end developer, the static information would be abstracted out of the front-end languages and stored and managed in the back-end languages for simplicity of use. It develops a connection between the back-end and front-end, so whenever the browser makes the request, it transfers it to the server-side, then the server responds to what the browser asks to do.
The back-end developer has the following responsibility,
- Scripting languages like PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, Node etc., are the prevalent back-end languages, and you don’t have to learn them all because they share a lot of commonalities.
- Upgrading cybersecurity
- Framework testing
- Maintaining application data access.
- High availability
- Data backup
- Transformation of data
Full Stack Development
Both front-end and back-end web development is now second nature to us. Take a closer look at full-stack development. A front-end and back-end developer is known as a full-stack developer. They are in charge of the whole technical stack that makes up a website. Full-stack web developers are experts in both front-end languages, back-end languages, frameworks, server networking and hosting.
They’re also likely to be knowledgeable with business administration and user experience, allowing them to get hands-on, advise, and counsel on methods. Full-stack developers have the unparalleled freedom to simultaneously work on front-end back-end development, evaluate the capabilities and potential of your website in real-time.
Types of Non-Coding Development
There are the non-coding sides of web development too. It’s not all about coding. Websites need content as well rather than just building pages. Content matters most on the website as your competitors have ranked themselves on search engines through their well-designed graphics and organised content. You don’t want your shop isolated from the market. No one will visit your shop because people prefer the market to see and buy products. Customer wants options; therefore, the search engine is the market on the internet, and you have to dominate it to make your sales.
Following are the types of non-coding development:
Web designing
A web designer is someone who creates the pleasant aesthetics of a website. They work hard to improve the website’s design and make it as appealing as possible. For the brand’s website, they develop engaging banners, themes, icons, and logos. A web designer has a better understanding of what colour to use and what fonts to utilise with their design. As a result, no coding is required. Web design needs a wholly distinct set of abilities. Various applications are used for graphics design, but the most prevalent are Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Canvas, and CorelDraw.
Content development
A website with all the pages, designing and colours wouldn’t mean anything if there is no content on a website. Content on the website initiates the communication with the visitors. When they read the tagline, captions, messages on the website, it builds certainty. But that’s not the only reason people have loads of content on their websites. It is for SEO purposes as well.
The task for content developers is to write high-quality content for the website. Content in a website such as taglines, captions, company portfolios, blog posts, and articles makes the difference to the customers. Content writer has to make that content for multiple reasons, one because the better the content, the more people will value it and have a higher regard for the company. Second, that is what google looks for now that brings us over to the SEO side again. Content and SEO are very closely aligned, which is why we have such a thing as SEO content writing.
Now you are familiar with web development and its type but curious about its process, so let’s jump on it.
Website Development Process
Website, may you think about having your website on the internet or maybe you need a new, better one. You can follow this seven-phase web development concept which will make developing a website easier for you.
Analysis
The first phase is always about gathering information, such as the website’s purpose, objectives, and target audience. Goals help you to align focus and determine a clear path to your destination. For an SEO purpose, it is essential to know that how a client defines success. The client defines success, and according to that definition, the website’s marketing will decide what to measure and where to focus. When the objectives are set, further analysis will count track of the target audience and execute it accordingly. You’ll test to know which effort is succeeding and which aren’t and can adjust things to make them work better.
Planning
Planning creates the definition of sitemaps, website structure, and technologies that are about to be used. You first have to plan the information about what is your website structure is going to be. How many pages you will create, how would they be categorised, and how you will link them. The organisation of the pages and making the hierarchy of that is significant for any website development. It helps the search engine and visitors to define clear paths for them on your website. For example, a visitor wants to go to your blog section’s third page, so there should be a link that will deliver them on that page through a single click.
Design
Designers focus on wireframe models and the usual style in stage, and the usability of the user interface for the best possible user experience.
Content
A crucial part of the process is choosing the correct text, which refers to the term copywriting. Photos and videos also play a massive role in the interaction with visitors. All the optimisation is not only for visitors but also for search engines.
Development
Here, you create the website using HTML and CSS coding with help from databases and other technologies and ensure the website is accessible to mobile devices.
Testing
You test all of the technical aspects of the website, such as code and script compatibility with web browsers, but we also ask ourselves, “Did the website accomplish its goal?”
Deployment
The task isn’t over after your site is up and running. Developers are constantly monitoring what happens after the start, allowing us to correct any potential flaws in the future.
Website Development Resources
I guess you are all ready to learn web development and need to know the resources to nourish your skills. The internet provides a platform where you can practice your coding skills. We’re going to look at free development resources. These resources include everything from designs, accessibility, cheat sheets, image resources, frameworks, code optimizations, and much more.
W3Schools
It is an online web tutorial that is optimised for learning, testing, and training. It gives you a tutorial on every programming language. This website is focused on simplicity. A beginner can understand and train codes easily.
Codeacademy
Fifty million individuals use Codeacademy to learn how to code for web development. They set out to create a new interactive learning paradigm that was engaging, adaptive, and accessible to as many people as possible. Since then, they’ve helped millions of individuals worldwide access modern technological talents and realise their full potential via code.
DEV
DEV is based on Forum, an open-source project that aims to empower communities. Because their programme is open source, you can go over every line of code and even contribute! Anyone interested in developing comparable groups in any speciality or passion can use Forum. You’re a web developer who has to get some materials out there, and this is where they come in. They provide both free and paid materials for creating and designing work.
What makes you a Great Web Developer
You want to be a web developer, or you are one and wondering if you have learned enough to be a successful web developer. There are particular abilities, though, in which you should excel.
Web Programming Skills:
A programmer must be able to build logic in their coding, which necessitates mathematical skills. The ability to solve problems is at the heart of mathematical talents. During coding, you may encounter several complexities and mistakes, but you will be able to cope with these issues consistently with programming language competency and problem-solving talents.
Creativity and attention to detail:
Web developers also have the responsibility to attract new visitors. They want to see something new on the website, and that’s where creativity comes in. You’ll try to design new templates or logic which requires new codes. Facing codes which are never been worked on before becomes challenging. Web developers have to be highly attentive while programming. Analytical skills help you to spot which problem is preventing you from getting your results. Remember, patience is the key to being a successful programmer.
FAQ's Web development basics
A website is an online collection of documents or data that you may access. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are used in its creation. We utilise a browser application to access the website and make it user-friendly for visitors. The function of the browser is to make the website usable for the viewers or clients.
Server store or host the content and files that make up web pages. The server’s role is to keep the information files and make them available for transmission when needed. When you use a browser to access a website, it sends a request over the internet to the servers where the website is located.
The internet is a global network of computer networks that allow users to share information with anybody who has access to a computer or a computer-like device. The internet is used by about 4.5 billion people worldwide. Although the terms “internet” and “worldwide web” are frequently used interchangeably, they are not synonymous. The internet is a worldwide network of networks, and the World Wide Web is a collection of information that users can access over the internet. In other terms, the web is a service within the internet’s infrastructure. So, how does that function in practice? The internet has two major components:
Network Protocol
Internet we’re using today is coming to exist by network protocols. Consider network as the bundle of common languages that allow computers to communicate via a network. The rules that say how data is structured, transferred, and received are known as protocols of the network. Accordingly, Servers, routers, and endpoints are examples of computer network components that can interact regardless of the infrastructure that supports them. Network protocols break down massive operations into a set of clearly defined roles and obligations at all levels of the network. Without standardized network protocols, computers would be unable to interact with one another, and the internet as we know it would not exist. Networks generally have three types of protocol;
- Communication.
- Management.
- Security
Many protocols of the network exist under a few categories, which handle anything from authentication to file retrieval to routing. Some standard protocol of networks includes;
- Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3)
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure ((HTTPS)
- Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP)
- File transport protocol (FTP)
- Telnet
TCP/IP comprises four layers that support different protocols and work together to enable internet connectivity.
Hardware
It primarily includes everything linked with the computers, such as smartphones and smart devices, to cell phone towers, radio, satellite servers, and cables that transmit information. We mainly use three methods to send data from one computer to the other. Those three methods are;
1:Electricity
You may have seen Ethernet cables. It is simply copper wires that we can hook up to a computer and send electricity through. So the advantage of sending bits of electricity is that it’s cheap and the disadvantage of that is it only covers medium distances. We’re not able to send bits very far on electric cables before the signals start to fade. The physical way we send bits using electricity is to set the wire to a high voltage to represent a 1, then put a low voltage to represent a zero. The computers can tell whether or zero or one is being sent on switching off between high and low voltages.
2:Light
How about sending bits with light? To do that, we use fibre optic cables. These are the big guns. These are the connection that is running across the oceans and continents. They can travel very long distances but are expensive. How does it transfer bits with lights? Well, the connection is set as a bright light for one and the dim light for zero. The computer understands from what end to transmit and from what end to receive because it detects the bright and dim light.
3:Radio
The real-life examples of sending bits with radio waves include a Wi-Fi router and cell towers, which cell phones use to send bits through the air using radio waves.
The text, buttons, graphics, and views you see on the screen make it interactive with the website or service, and the website’s front-end programming is user-interface. The technique of building interactive interfaces is known as front-end development.
The front-end code organises information received from a server and makes it accessible to clients. There are three primary programming languages used for front-end development: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
When you use the internet, you don’t see the back-end (or server-side). It’s the digital foundation, and it appears to non-developers as a jumble of numbers, characters, and symbols.
Back-end coding languages exceed front-end coding languages by a factor of two. This is because browsers only comprehend JavaScript, CSS, and HTML on the front end, while a back-end server may be built to support practically any language.
The HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It’s a protocol that allows a client browser to connect with a web server at the layer seven level. It transports people to other websites and distributes material such as photos, videos, music, and documents. When two computers, the client and the server, desire to communicate data, HTTP creates a request and response cycle between them. The client is the computer that initiates the request, and the server is the computer that answers to it.
The HTTP protocol has three key characteristics. HTTP is a connectionless protocol that allows computers to interact via request and response cycles. When a client requests something, the two computers become disconnected, and when the server answers, the two computers reattach. Once a request is made, computers do not expect a response from each other. The second advantage is that HTTP may send any type of data and offers a foundation for both computers to communicate in the same language. The next point to mention is that HTTP is a stateless protocol. It doesn’t keep track of any information on the state.
Coding is the process of instructing a computer to complete a task using programming languages. Coding, to put it another way, is getting a computer to perform your instruction exactly. A script is a document that contains several lines of code. This collection of vocabulary, grammatical rules, and punctuation allows a programmer and a computer to communicate. It might be a change in picture size or the script’s implementation of buttons on the hover effect. When you’re on social media, for example, you like a friend’s post, that’s a script in the background.
There are several programming languages, and the one you pick depends on the type of software you want to create. For example, the CSS language is used to make your website dynamic with colors and fonts. In contrast, the Golang programming language is the most acceptable option for server-side programming.
The Content Management System (CMS) is a website editing tool with a user-friendly interface. No coding is required to make the webpage interactive. CMS is the application that is available for non-developers to construct and administer their websites.
CMS is becoming increasingly popular among both web developers and non-developers. Developers save time and effort by not having to code the website from scratch. CMS already has plugins-based infrastructure, so website enhancement is as simple as clicking a button. It comes with pre-designed layouts that you may customise to match your brand. WordPress is the most widely used content management system (CMS), making website administration a breeze.
Cyber security is defined as the techniques of practices designed to protect data. In cybersecurity, data refers to digital data that is stored and transmitted on an information system. That’s what the attacker is after often. Sustaining the privacy of an individual and keeping the data secured is the primary concern of cybersecurity practice. There are always vulnerabilities on the software, and hackers keep looking for them, so it’s an ongoing process to keep cybersecurity updated.
References
(n.d.). Types of web development. Retrieved from maryville.edu, : https://online.maryville.edu/online-bachelors-degrees/computer-science/careers/types-of-web-development/
Decker, A. (2020). The Beginner’s Guide to Website Development. Retrieved from blog.hubspot.com,: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/website-development
Thomas, R. (n.d.). 5 Reasons Why Web Development Is Still Important. Retrieved from wsi-emarketing, : https://blog.wsi-emarketing.com/web-development-important-reasons/
Terry, C. (2019). How to Become a Desktop Developer. Retrieved from noodle.com, : https://www.noodle.com/articles/how-to-become-a-desktop-developer-desktop-is-not-dead
Nehra, M. (2019). The Evolution of Web Development & Its Modern Trends. Retrieved from decipherzone.com,: https://decipherzone.com/blog-detail/evolution-web-development
(n.d.). Web Development. Retrieved from wikipedia.org, : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_development
