Working online, we find that there are many jobs that we didn’t previously know about. For example, when doing anything on the internet, did you know that someone has to maintain a site, or even an online application. It doesn’t just run on its own, or rather, it does for a time, before there is a bug after an update.
Someone needs to build the sites in the first place and make them stable and pretty to use, easy to interact with. Someone also needs to work on bringing us new services over the internet, such as better spell checking and better recommendations when we search.
Web developers do many of these things, if not all of them.
What is web development, you might have asked? Well, let us look closer and try to explain.
Web Development – The Content on the Internet Has to Start Somewhere
While someone has to write the articles you read and another needs to take the photos that you see, someone also needs to build the website that you are spending time on. Web developers take care of the latter, building sites and applications that work on the internet and are primarily meant for being used through the internet.
Web development means working on a site or otherwise service that is working on the internet. Sites are typically what web development deals with most of the time. So, whenever you are on a site and something isn’t working, you will know who to blame, the web developers. But, which one?
The Looks – Front-End
Someone needs to take care of the site’s looks and the way it behaves. Front-end developers focus on everything the site presents to you, all the visual content that you see on the pages. Front-end developers are typically familiar with JavaScript, HTML and CSS as these languages generate all the content on a webpage. As such, whenever there is a visual bug or something isn’t visually appropriate, or the site is a mess to navigate, blame the front-end developer.
All jokes aside, it is a serious job that often involves working with a designer and combining the efforts to make the site as pretty as possible, while also preserving loading times so that the content may be seen in less than a second.
The Logic of a Site – Back-end
Whenever the server is involved, which is all the time when you are using a site or any service that uses the internet, the back-end developers are behind that. They focus on all the parts that deal with the server side of things on a website.
Pull requests, search requests, page loading, server side optimization, back-end developers handle all the computing that the user doesn’t see taking place. The user sees the results of those processes and the back-end developer makes sure that they are running properly.
A Bit of Both for the Most Part
Most web developers have to learn both, due to the nature of the job. You cannot have one without the other and while some of them don’t focus on both parts, they typically know what is going on in the background or foreground of a site. This process requires communication between the two developers.
Sometimes, there is only one developer, known as a full-stack developer.
Simple and easy to understand as a concept, this is what web development is.
