A short guide to Starting ‘Web Development’

Photo by Clément H on Unsplash

In this humongous field of web development, one might ask ‘Where to start from?’ Though there is a lot of material available on various links, this guide would help you in finding a direction.

1. Learning HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) & Javascript (JS)

The very first step to enter a field is to learn the basics. HTML, CSS, and JS constitute the basics that one needs to be familiar with. Then after you get a hold on the basics, try and dive deeper into their usage and implementation in creating a web application.

2. Choosing a framework

“A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build and deploy web applications on the World Wide Web”-Wikipedia

I consider this a crucial step in developing any application. From so many CSS & JS frameworks, which ones are to be used depends on the use of the application and the constraints if any while hosting that one might face.

Now there can be two cases, either one is going for developing a static application or a dynamic one. While static applications can be created easily with the basics, the role of choosing a framework is crucial in building dynamic websites.

i. For ‘beautifying’ your existing project, i.e. by using an external CSS framework, I highly recommend TailwindCSS and Bootstrap, which saves your time in writing your own CSS.

ii. For building dynamic websites, Vue.js, ReactJs, Angular, Backbone.js, Ember.js, PolymerJS, Flask & Django, and for extensive data, Extjs are being used. All of these are built on top of Javascript (except Flask & Django, based on python), so be sure to get through it beforehand.

Some of the factors that can influence the choice of the framework/library are:

  1. Performing Server Side Rendering,
  2. Shaping it into a Progressive Web Application,
  3. State-While-Revalidate,
  4. External CSS/SCSS/SASS support,
  5. Whether it comes with design components or not.

3. Hosting your website

There are many platforms that let you host your website for free:

  1. Layer0: The All-in-one Jamstack platform to develop, deploy, preview, split test and monitor your frontend! Supports any framework with a great free plan.
  2. Vercel: This platform also supports any framework that one might come across. Use cases covered include static as well as dynamic websites. All users get free unlimited domains to deploy on, with zero configuration required.
  3. Netlify: This platform is famous to let developers have serverless backend services for web applications and static websites.
  4. Github Pages: This open-source platform allows one to host their static website and by using the ‘gh-pages’ package to host react websites too.

I hope this helps!

Keep learning, developing and deploying :D