ANATOMY OF WEBSITES
Typically websites are made up of two parts known as front-end and back-end. As their names identify front-end is the client-side of a website which loads in your browser when you visit a website and back-end is the server-side where all the processing is done. Front-end is what visitor sees and back-end is which they don’t see.
Think of it as a restaurant. You see the served food but you don’t see the kitchen where all that food is cooked. That food is the front-end and the kitchen is the back-end.
COMMON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
Most people these days use WordPress to create different kinds of websites. So when they say web development, most of the times they are talking about creating websites using WordPress. See, in a way it’s correct but just keep in mind that not every website is made up of WordPress.
HTML:
It’s not a programming language but yeah, it’s HyperText Markup Language as you all know.
HTML is the base language used in the front-end part of a website. In the front-end, it’s like a skeleton of our body. Its the basic structure of a website.
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CSS:
It stands for Cascading Style Sheets. As its name denotes it’s a styling language. Remember that skeleton term used to describe HTML? It’s the flush + clothes to that skeleton. The structure is made up of HTML and then it’s styled using CSS. Styling includes changing colors, defining the height and width of different sections of the user interface, etc.
Javascript:
So, this is the one which is hot and still trending in the market. It’s used in both front-end and back-end but let’s talk about its role in the front-end for now. In front-end, it acts as a scripting language. It’s embedded in the HTML code (structure/skeleton) to perform more complex tasks than just the visual look.
Remember that Skeleton and flush example? We can call that thing an organism now? Can’t we? :p So, what if we give that organism some tools that empower him. Tools like a knife, a gun or maybe a bike. It’s just something that makes him able to do more complex tasks. JavaScript is like those tools to a website. Things like image sliders and popups are possible because of JS.
PHP:
It’s a back-end programming language. So talking about that kitchen example again, you must be thinking about what kind of processing is done in the back-end like how is it relatable to the kitchen. Let me explain. Processing could be anything like fetching data from the Database (databases are used to store data like user details, etc.) or calculating a user’s total earned amount (like on Fiverr ;)).
In our Kitchen example, the cooking of the food is the processing and the chef is PHP.
WORDPRESS
It’s a content management system built with PHP. Its front-end is divided into two parts. One is simply the website design that visitors typically see. And the other is the control panel which the admin visits to do some complex tasks.
The control panel part of a WordPress site is possible because of PHP and back-end. You can do much more complex tasks in the control panel of a WordPress site like uploading images, writing articles, approving comments, etc. All this is possible because of the processing done in the back-end using the PHP.
It’s an open-source tool which means that its code can be modified according to a user’s personal needs. Those modified WordPress sites are typically called custom WordPress sites. Modification could be anything like adding a user signup/login system or anything that can’t be done by features that are already available.