Intro

Web development is one of the most in-demand tech skills and is considered worthy enough to master in 2023. Despite remarkable breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of ChatGPT, Bard, etc. in recent years, the field of web development is not going anywhere and still has enormous room for newcomers.

Web development has been ranked as the happiest career path for the past few years and is considered to be fairly easy to break into. However, kicking off your learning journey in web development is not that straightforward, especially for someone with no technical background. You may hear so many buzzwords like vue, react, vanilla, bootstrap, etc that you’ll be unfamiliar with.

Web development can be divided into two main sub-categories i.e. Front-end development (user-side) and Back-end development (server-side). Front-end is purely concerned with the UI / UX of a website and can be accomplished through a combination of HTML, CSS, and JS. Whereas, Back-end is where the business logic resides and all the computations & data manipulations are implemented

Foundational Tech Stack

In this article, I have formed a concise yet comprehensive list of skills/tools that could help you start in web development. The details are as follows: -

• HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the basic building block of a website. HTML forms the core skeleton of a website and also contains all the content.

• CSS: Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is used for styling the elements on a webpage. The colour and size of fonts, the format, and the styling of headings/paragraphs are all driven by the CSS.

A simple static website can be developed by using only HTML & CSS.

• JavaScript: If you’re switching to web development, you must have heard about javascript. JS is the most famous and in-demand web development tool/skill that makes a website interactive. Interactivity is what makes a website lively.

With the fundamental knowledge of this foundational tech stack, you can build any interactive and responsive website but would require to repeat many tedious tasks.

Imagine starting a vehicle manufacturing company, the manufactured vehicles are a combination of various components like structure, engine, chassis, fuel systems, tires, etc. The manufacturer is not required to build everything from scratch but rather to assemble already-built components to deliver fast and efficient products.

Frameworks & Libraries

The field of web development has evolved, and many libraries and frameworks have been devised on top of CSS and JavaScript. Just like a vehicle manufacturing company, now you can easily utilize pre-built frameworks, libraries, and APIs to speed up the development time without implementing each component from scratch. A few major frameworks/libraries are mentioned below: -

• Bootstrap

• Tailwind

• React

• Angular

• Express

• Vue

The purpose of these frameworks and libraries is to either ease the styling process or to smoothen the interactiveness of a website. Today, it is very rare to find a website built only without the use of any framework or library. The details of the above-stated frameworks will be covered in the next article of the web development series.

Outro

Web development is considered to be one of the most rewarding skills and is simple to break into. All you need to become a web developer in 2023 is to have a strong will, an internet connection, a computer, time, and consistent efforts with an open mind.