Web Technologies and Development Fundamentals

Becoming a web developer is easy — this is the opinion of most people when talking about creating websites. But how things are working in practice? We can say that any person is capable of becoming a developer in this field. But not everyone who states this has achieved significant success in such difficult activity. It is necessary to start somewhere though.

What a web developer needs to know

These basic concepts will help beginners who want to try themselves in creating websites and web applications to join development technologies.

1. HTML

Everyone starts with HTML, as it is the basis for building sites. At the moment, good web developers are those who perfectly know HTML, the fifth version in particular. HTML is a hypertext markup language. It is built into absolutely all browsers and is the standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Also, if the code is written in the PHP programming language, the browser automatically interprets it into the HTML markup language. In general, HTML is the standard for a web document and without it, pages cannot exist.

2. CSS

It is possible to draw an analogy with the frame of the house and its external side (shell). HTML is the frame of a building, and CSS is its front side, shell. CSS sets the styling of elements on the page, and in the third version, it is possible to create more dynamically beautiful objects. Previously, learning CSS wasn’t something mandatory, but now it’s not the case anymore. Of course, you can create a website without touching the CSS code at all, however, the person who works like this will look like a beginner looking at the source code of the site.

3. JavaScript

Inexperienced people argue that it is not necessary to know JavaScript in order to become a web developer. But this is fundamentally wrong judgement. JavaScript itself is a rather powerful language that allows you to create interactive windows, dynamic objects on a web page, and much more on the client-side. The majority of old sites don’t need it, but for a modern developer, this web programming language is very useful. Recently, it is possible to create a server-side of the site (back-end) with the help of libraries written in JavaScript. Previously, this was considered to be practically unrealisable.

4. DOM Document Structure

Having understood the basics of JavaScript and CSS, you can safely move to learn the DOM ‘tree’ and use all the knowledge that has already been studied. DOM is a sort of cross-platform or language-independent software module. With DOM help, programs and scripts can access documents such as HTML, XHTML, XML, and modify their structure. If you do not learn how to manipulate DOM elements, you can still remain the developer of second-rate themes for WordPress. Understanding DOM gives you the ability to work with more serious projects.

5. PHP

The PHP programming language is designed to create a server-side of the website. It is not displayed in the source code of the site but is interpreted by the browser in HTML (available only to developers in the code editor). In contrast to JavaScript, there is no website created without PHP. Learning this language will give a big boost in development, along with the opportunity to take more expensive orders on freelance platforms. After that, it would be possible to take orders, e.g. turn-key website creation, revision of the database, any other services of PHP-based development.

Web development is progressing

Do not forget that almost every day there are new technologies, and old ones are also regularly updated. If something fails, do not be upset, because understanding comes with experience. The work of a web programmer is a continuous learning curve that never ends.