Web development comes with a huge set of rules and techniques every website developer should know about. If you want a website to look and function as you wish them to, you need to get familiar with web technologies that will help you achieve your goal.

Developing an app or a website typically comes down to knowing 3 main languages: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. And while it sounds quite complicated, once you know what you are doing, understanding web technology and the way it works becomes significantly easier.

Fret not if it is not coming easily to you immediately. You may need more time, training, and patience to dive deeper into the subject, but you’ll end up with a good understanding eventually.

We present you with an introduction to web technologies and the latest web technologies list hoping it will make things at least a bit easier for you. Now, let’s take a look.

What is Web Technology?

You have probably heard the term “web development technologies” before, but did you ever think about what it actually means?

Since computers can’t communicate with each other the way people do, they require codes instead. Web technologies are the markup languages and multimedia packages computers use to communicate.

1. Browsers

Browsers request information and then they show us in the way we can understand. Think of them as the interpreters of the web. Here are the most popular ones:

Google Chrome – Currently, the most popular browser brought to you by Google

Safari – Apple’s web browser

Firefox – Open-source browser supported by the Mozilla Foundation

Internet Explorer – Microsoft’s browser

2. HTML & CSS

HTML is one of the first you should learn. Thanks to HTML, the web browsers know what to show once they receive the request. If you want to better understand how HTML works, you also need to know what CSS is.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on the screen. If you browse enough tutorials, you’ll soon create CSS text effects, page transitions, image hover effects, and more. 

If you’re a complete beginner, this Essential HTML & CSS training by James Williamson will help you to quickly get started with these technologies.

3. Web Development Frameworks

Web development frameworks are a starting point of items that a developer can use to avoid doing the simple or mundane tasks, and instead get right to work.

Angular

Angular is one of the latest web technologies designed specifically for developing dynamic web applications. With this framework, you can easily create front-end based applications without needing to use other frameworks or plugins.

The features include well-made templates, MVC architecture, code generation, code splitting etc. All the expressions are like code snippets that enclosed within curly braces and do not use any loops or conditional statements.

If you would like to start using Angular or to just quickly evaluate if this framework would be the right solution for your projects, you can check out this 3-hour training, published in June 2019 by Justin Schwartzenberger, a Google Developer Expert. This course covers everything that’s necessary to start using Angular, from basic architecture, work with DOM, data binding, routing, and components, to more advanced topics such as directives and pipes.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a server-side website technology that makes app development much easier and faster. The thing that really sets this framework apart is the reusability of the code as well as some other cool features that will help you get the job done in no time.

Popular websites written with Ruby include Basecamp, Ask.fm, GitHub, 500px, and many others.

Here is everything you need to know about Ruby on Rails.

If you would are interested in a more in-depth training on Ruby on Rails framework, this 10-hour course by Kevin Skoglund, a senior Ruby developer, might be just the right resource to get started. It covers the complete learning cycle from the very fundamentals to more advanced topics such as Layouts, Partials, and View Helpers, giving quite a few practical tasks in parallel.

YII

Yii is an open-source web application development framework built in PHP5. It is performance-optimized and comes with a number of great tools for debugging and app testing. Another plus is that it is pretty simple and easy to use.

Meteor JS

Meteor JS is written in Node.js and it makes it possible for you to create real-time web applications for different platforms. The framework for creating simple websites for personal use really stands out with Meteor JS.

This is an open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework which also means that the webpage loading time is significantly shorter. JavaScript stack also makes it possible to get the same results with fewer lines of code than usual.

This online video course gives an interesting practical example of combining MeteorJS and React to build a web app.

Express.js

Developed in Node.js, Express.js is a web app development network that is great for those who need to develop apps and APIs as fast as possible. A lot of great features are provided with the help of plugins.

This course provides a good insight into the advanced usage of Express.js in combination with MongoDB and Mongoose and shows different ways of deploying an Express app and …

While web development typically refers to web markup and coding, it includes all related development tasks, such as client-side scripting, server-side scripting, server and network security configuration, ecommerce development, and content management system (CMS) development.

See why thousands of customers use CMS Hub to build an optimized website that integrates with their HubSpot CRM data and full marketing suite.

Why is web development important?

You might be a business owner hiring a freelance developer to build your website, a marketer pitching a vision to your development team, or a student learning about development as a career. Regardless of who you are or why you’re reading this guide, understanding the basics of website development can be helpful in this technology-driven world.

The internet isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, it’s become a portal and primary method of research, connection, education, and entertainment in the world. As of 2019, there are 4.2 billion global internet users. That’s more than half the world’s population, and these folks are using the internet for a vast variety of reasons.

What’s the one thing those reasons have in common? They require a website, and each website requires a skilled web developer.

Web development is also a rapidly expanding industry. Between now and 2028, the employment of web developers is expected to grow by 13%. That’s much faster than most other technology careers.

Now that we’ve defined web development, let’s review some web development basics to better acquaint you with the topic.

1. What a Website Is

Websites are files stored on servers, which are computers that host (fancy term for “store files for”) websites. These servers are connected to a giant network called the internet … or the World Wide Web (if we’re sticking with 90s terminology). We talk more about servers in the next section.

Browsers are computer programs that load the websites via your internet connection, such as Google Chrome or Internet Explorer. Your computer is also known as the client.

2. What an IP Address Is

Internet Protocol is a set of standards that govern interaction on the internet.

To access a website, you need to know its IP address. An IP address is a unique string of numbers. Each device has an IP address to distinguish itself from the billions of websites and devices connected via the internet.

The IP address for HubSpot is 104.16.249.5. You can find any website’s IP address by visiting a site like Site 24×7 or by using Command Prompt on Windows or Network Utility > Traceroute on MacBooks.

To find your device’s IP address, you can also type “what’s my IP address” into your search browser.

While you can access a website using its IP address, most internet users prefer to use domain names or by going through search engines.

3. What HTTP Means

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) connects you and your website request to the remote server that houses all website data. It’s a set of rules (a protocol) that defines how messages should be sent over the internet. It allows you to jump between site pages and websites.

When you type a website into your web browser or search for something through a search engine, HTTP provides a framework so that the client (computer) and server can speak the same language when they make requests and responses to each other over the internet. It’s essentially the translator between you and the internet — it reads your website request, reads the code sent back from the server, and translates it for you in the form of a website.

4. What Coding Is

Coding refers to writing code for servers and applications using programming languages. They’re called “languages” because they comprise vocabulary and grammatical rules for communicating with computers. They also include special commands, abbreviations, and punctuation that can only be read by devices and programs.

All software is written by at least one coding language, but languages vary based on platform, operating system, and style. There are many different types of coding languages…all of which fall into two categories, front-end and back-end.

5. What Front-end Means

Front-end (or client-side) is the side of a website or software that you see and interact with as an internet user. When website information is transferred from a server to a browser, front-end coding languages allow the website to function without having to continually “communicate” with the internet.

Front-end code allows users like you and me to interact with a website and play videos, expand or minimize images, highlight text, and more. Web developers who work on front-end coding work on client-side development.

We’ll unpack more about front-end development in the next section.

6. What Back-end Means

Back-end (or server-side) is the side that you don’t see when you use the internet. It’s the digital infrastructure, and to non-developers, it looks like a bunch of numbers, letters, and symbols.

There are more back-end coding languages than front-end languages. That’s because browsers — at the front-end — only …

Linguistics and philology are commonly considered as humanities. They are rarely associated with exact sciences, whereas programming would be more likely related to maths in popular opinion.

However, those two areas are closely related, and my experience proves that a degree in linguistics can help one become a good web developer. After all, both deal with languages. Linguistic studies provided me with the skills and knowledge necessary to rock in coding. I believe that I’ve got a considerable advantage in learning how to code and here are some arguments to support my point of view.
1. Studying the Patterns
Linguistics is not about learning new languages, but more about studying their structure and rules that define them, finding abstractions, and comparing the different ways they use to convey the same messages. Different languages – whether they are natural or programming languages – might function in some ways. Therefore, understanding the principles of a number of natural languages gives me the ability to quickly spot patterns in the next language I learn.

On top of that, in many cases some elements of the structure are similar in two separate languages, so once I picked those up, I could easily leverage this when learning the two programming languages that don’t seem to share an immediate ancestor. Therefore, switching from object-oriented Ruby to functional Scala will potentially be much easier for me in the future, should I decide to learn it. And let’s be honest – web development requires you to juggle a few different languages at all times and always be on the lookout for the “next big thing” that may or may not become the new standard.

How Being a Linguist Helped Me Rock in Web Development
2. Taking Advanced Courses
Standard programming courses online are usually delivered in a clear and easily understandable way. They provide basic information about coding, but they are not sufficient for professional development. Advanced or more academic online courses (provided as MOOCs by universities), provide you with a more in-depth knowledge but are usually conveyed through a more sophisticated language and most of them are currently available for English speakers only.

Having completed dozens of academic courses on different difficulty levels – and all delivered in English – I learned how to absorb knowledge from more sources than would have been possible without the academic experience with English.

What’s more, academic language is more advanced and harder to comprehend. But once I got my head around it, it became much easier to learn new skills from courses organized by Harvard or Stanford Universities that are provided in English.

3. Learning Unusual Languages
I majored in English and Arabic translation. And Arabic is nothing like what I was used to when dealing with European languages. It has totally different structures, rules, patterns, let alone the alphabet. Learning it required shifting my way of thinking to totally different tracks. Discrepancies are enormous, especially if one decides to learn Arabic without looking at it through the lens of European language norms and principles. To make it even more interesting, we even touched on the basic grammar rules of Klingon.

How Being a Linguist Helped Me Rock in Web Development
Experience with Arabic came really useful when I started coding, as I also had to switch off my standard line of thought. Programming languages belong to a totally different group. They allow communication with computers, and therefore, require a distinct mindset as well.

4. Juggling Between Languages
Another thing that I acquired during my university studies and found very useful in coding is the ability to switch easily between different languages. Many people find it hard to get used to when taking up a second foreign language. Both languages start to mix up. However, having been forced to switch between three different languages almost every day solved that problem for me and now I can easily juggle between Arabic and English or JavaScript and Ruby.

5. Having an Eye for Details and Punctuation
Each and every language has different rules of punctuation. This also applies to coding. However, in the case of the latter, punctuation principles have even more important than in natural languages, since your reader may infer your intended meaning despite punctuation errors, but the compiler or browser will not be so forgiving. Punctuation errors will result in either errors or different behavior than you intended.

How Being a Linguist Helped Me Rock in Web Development
Having gone through multiple languages and their complex systems of where and why to put a comma in a sentence taught me precision in punctuation. The Ruby programming language that we embrace at Netguru might be less strict in that area compared to more strict languages, but our code review is quite demanding, so I believe that my linguistic experience helped me master my code review.

Wrap-up
Being a linguist helped me in becoming a better developer. Learning new programming languages came quite easily and now I am more accurate and systematic in my everyday job. However, it doesn’t mean I didn’t have to study coding at all. It still required a lot of effort on my side. But once I picked it up, it’s mostly satisfaction and fun.…