Servage Magazine

Creating your own website isn’t just something you do. It takes time, effort and knowledge. There are many website-builders out there which take the navy load of your hands, and provides you with tons of great publishing tools – however, if you really want to create your own system for custom purposes, there is no way around getting into web development yourself. Don’t worry, it’s actually a lot of fun!

What you need to know

Websites are essentially just documents that are delivered to the browser for display. This is standardized in the HTML language which browsers display. In order to make the HTML document look nice, you can design it by using styles, which is standardized in the CSS language, which describes sizes, colors, positions etc. For dynamic effects and functions you use JavaScript to manipulate your HTML document or CSS layout on the fly. This essentially means you can change things on your website without actually reloading the entire HTML document.

Building web applications

For most projects you need dynamic handling of data and not just serve static HTML documents. You might want to display data from a database, or even let users change data in a database. For this purpose you use a scripting language which can communicate with a database, and dynamically create your HTML documents. A very popular language for this purpose is PHP. A very popular database system is MySQL. With PHP and MySQL plus HTML/CSS/JavaScript you can build anything you want.

Where to start

There are lots of tutorials and guides out there to help you get started. A collection of good and well-written tutorials are available for free from W3 Schools. Check them out here.