What is web development?

Web development is the software development practice in which the web technologies are used to build web sites and applications. In short, it's defined as the work that involves creating websites or applications. And the people who do that work are called web developers.

The web is a technology that uses the internet to distribute and allow the shaing of interconnected files; Files generally called web documents. It uses a certain number of rules(protocoles) to make that happen. The major technologies that make up the web are HTTP, HTML, and the Browser. The Web is often refered to as the World Wide Web(WWW).
Concerning web documents, imagine them as our traditional A4 documents but with more power. Our traditional documents are created using graphical user interface software such as Microsoft Word, the web documents are created by using the HTML(HyperText Markup Language).

When you put one or many web documents into a single drawer(server), you have what we call a website. And when people access the website through the browser, they view your web documents as what we call web pages.

Learning web development is basically studying these technologies and many others around them such CSS and Javascript. You would generally start with HTML, and use the browser often to preview your websites. You might decide to add some CSS and/or Javascript.

The process developing a website/web application involves stages such as planning, creating content, the marketing, and maintrenance. You might be involved in one or many of these areas depending on the job. In the early days of the web, people who did this job where called webmasters, because they had to do all this alone.

In today web development field, we have different branches that allow us to deligate, or allow a developer to focus on only a part of the job. Let's see the various branches(stacks) modern in web development:

Front-End Development

This branch focuses on the client(browser) side of the web application. It's concerned with the design, layouts, interactivities, and user interactions. To achieve all this, HTML, CSS, Javascript can be used. And this infers that a front-end developer must have a decent knowledge of these languages.

Back-End Development

This branch focuses on the server side of the wbe application. There are applications that require some computations to be done by the server or to store and manage some data. Sometimes we want part/all the application logic to be out of the user's reach, so we move that to the server. The languages that help in that are PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Node.js, etc. To be a backend developer involves knowing one or many of these languages.

Full-Stack Development

Full-stack development involves the first two sides, fron and backend. A full-stack developer must know at least one front-end technology and at least one back-end technology and know how to combine them.