Are you wondering what web development is? Well, today we are here to make you understand in detail what is what everyone calls web development or the development of a web project.
But be careful because web development does not only include the creation of a website but also the interfaces between company information systems and everything concerning the network and obviously the web app sector.
What is web development and how does a site works
As we have anticipated, to the question of what web development is we can answer that it is the creation of a website.
Well, so what is a website and how does it work? We can define a website as a set of hypertext documents and multimedia elements (such as images, videos, and so on) organized in web pages.
In practice, the document files are uploaded by the webmaster on the webspace of a host (or a server computer) which is connected to the internet 24 hours a day.
Thus, when users connect to the host address through their browser, the server sends them the hypertext document they requested. This is how users (so-called clients ) can navigate between various documents on remote PCs that are also located on the other side of the world.
There are two types of websites :
- Static websites
- Dynamic websites
Let’s see the differences.
Static websites
Static websites are those sites invented in the ‘ early’ 90s. As you can imagine, these were actually static websites without the word, made only with HTML.
Yes, because in those years CMS systems did not yet exist, and it was necessary to do everything manually, using only text editors (Notepad) and browsers (think Netscape Navigator).
Only later were style sheets invented and websites started with the first versions of CSS.
Dynamic websites
What are dynamic websites? We can say that they are those sites created through server-side scripting languages and that are able to “create” web pages when the user requests them.
Did you understand why they are called “dynamic”? Unlike static websites, these sites, therefore, are not made up of HTML files since each HTML page is created by the server by executing the script.
To give you a concrete example, one of the scripting languages used to create dynamic websites is the PHP language, born to be used on the Linux operating system (although it has recently also been used on Microsoft Windows servers).
What is web development: web 2.0
We have seen what web development is and what a site is but now it is only right to tell you about the evolution that the web has undergone in recent years.
In fact, if about twenty years ago we talked about web 1.0, now we talk about web 2.0: in a nutshell, we can say that the world of the web has evolved from the first generation to the second, the one made up of CMS, social networks and social media. Not to mention that web development is no longer oriented only to PCs but also to other devices such as smartphones, tablets, and various consoles.
How to create a website
But let’s get to the point and understand how to create a website through tools that are more accessible to everyone, not just web developers, or web programmers.
First of all, you must know that building a site is not as difficult as it used to be: now it is no longer necessary to have the technical-IT bases, you just need to be able to install a CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal or at best (recommended ) use Laravel that attention is not a CMS, but a framework!
What is a CMS
Note: a CMS, acronym for Content Management System, is software that is installed on a webserver to facilitate the management of the contents of a website.
So, everyone or almost everyone can open a website online and manage it through a convenient control panel with which you can easily manage all publications.
Obviously, we are talking about the creation of blogs and small magazines because CMS is not suitable for the creation of more complex portals which, instead, require the expert hand of a computer engineer rather than a web developer.
