Web Development

Although the term web development can be used in a broad sense to mean anything related to creating and maintaining a website, in my opinion web development is more about the building side of the process rather than the marketing or designing aspects.

For me website development is the process of taking a complete website design and turning it into a fully operational, fully interactive website through whichever means the programmer chooses to take. I’ll be concentrating on the methods and languages that I am most comfortable with, and by extension, the ones that I use on a day-to-day basis. These programming languages are HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), Actionscript 2.0 & 3.0, which I use to create animation on the site, and PHP, a server side language which allows more flexibility and are more dynamic than regular HTML. I talk about each of these languages in depth on some of the other pages in this section.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Recently website development has seen the rise of content management systems (CMS) which allows for the whole backend of the site, where the code is edited, to be online. This can be particularly helpful, when handled correctly as it means that multiple users can log in from whatever computer they are on in the world and make instant changes that can keep a website more relevant and up to date than ever before. They also invite the use of more dynamic programming languages, such as PHP or the agile Ruby, raising the bar of website quality further than ever before. CMS is, in my opinion, is a real asset to a company, provided only a small number of experienced staff members are granted access.

The most popular CMS, is in fact not really a CMS at all. Wordpress.org, began life as a blogging platform, allowing users with no experience in programming languages to create websites from predefined templates and add open source widgets to enhance their sites. As time has gone on however more and more web professionals have become involved in WordPress and as a result more demands have been placed on the setup which, to it’s credit WordPress has met remarkably well to date. This ability, along with the great plug-ins being released everyday by freelance and open source developers such as Joost de Valk, has contributed to WordPress’ ever increasing popularity in the web development and search marketing industries.