Web development basics

Web Development Basics?

Web development is basically the term used to refer to the activities that are connected in the development of a website to be put up on an Intranet or the World Wide Web. It could be split into different areas like web content development, web server configuration, server side coding, client side coding and of course, web design.

But among webmasters and other web professionals, the term web development is commonly used to refer to the aspects of website building which are not directly related to designing such as coding and writing markup. It could range from the design and development of a simple web page that only has plain text to the most sophisticated and complex electronic businesses, web-based applications or social networking services.

What you should know?

Web Development

Web Development in the most simplistic term means to create a website for the Internet. There are plenty of websites out there and just like a painting is created by a painter, a website is essentially built by web developers and web designers. Go to any website and press Ctrl+U (for Windows) or Cmd+U (for Mac) to see what’s called the ‘source code’ of a website.

While web developers are responsible for the coding and programming aspect of a website, the web designers design the theme, layout, images and decide the color scheme of the website, which is then used by a web developer in putting together the website.

It’s highly beneficial to have a fair amount of designing knowledge like:
Basic Photoshop skills.
Typography (which is basically your font choice and layout of text).
How you use colours.

Web Development

A web page is simply an electronic page that is a part of a book which in this case is a website.
A website is composed of several web pages. These web pages are a combination of text, images, videos and links. Web pages are often linked to each other through hyperlinks

Hyperlink

A hyperlink is a link that is hyper-active. OK, that was a bad joke.
It is actually a link that directs you to a different page on the same website or a different website altogether.
If you move your cursor over the text it would often change to a ‘finger’ or sometimes the color of the text would change and an underline would appear.
To see a hyperlink in action, click here.

Web Browser

Web browsers are software applications that you use to access everything on the World Wide Web (commonly known as the internet).
Examples of web browsers would be: Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer.

Search Engine

Search engines let a user locate relevant websites based on the phrases and keywords entered by the user.
Think of the World Wide Web (the internet) as a library of websites and you are looking for something specific, you then do search on a search engine.
Some common search engines are: Google, Bing and Yahoo.

IP address

An IP address is a unique numerical address that identifies every computing device like personal computers, tablets, smart phones etc. to communicate with other devices in the IP network. It’s basically a cellphone number for your laptop or like a number plate for a car.
The server receives a request for a page sent by your web browser. The browser connects to the server using an IP address. In return, the server sends back the requested page back to your IP address. To find your IP Address, check out: whatismyipaddress.com

Domain

A domain is your ‘property’ on the internet. So for example, my ‘home’ is: www.trafficbuilder.biz – I own it, this is my domain. No two websites can have the same domain name. This is the address people will use to visit your ‘home’ which is your website. An URL (Uniform Resource Locator,) carries the domain name. A domain name consists of a top-level and a second-level domain. A top-level domain extension (TLD) is the part of the domain name located to the right of the dot (“.”) like .com, .net, and .org.
A TLD identifies something about the website associated with it, such as its purpose, the organization that owns it or the geographical area where it originates, like .com is mostly used for commercial purposes while .edu is used for educational institutions.
Just like you would go through a property agent to buy a property, you need to go through a hosting provider to buy a domain. Traffic Builder provides hosting services with Free Domain.