Overview of Web Development in 2020

An overview of developing a website in 2020

So if you’re reading this, chances are that you need a website or you need to build one. In either case this guide will walk you through the basic requirements and things that you need to get started.

Site Map

So to start as basic and small as possible, begin the project by outlining all of the pages, how they will be linked, and probably basic features of the project.

Example

Having a basic outline of what you’re working on will help you be more organized, allowing you to know what needs to be built versus what you can already start with.

This part isn’t necessary but it will make your building process much simpler.

Design

So now you might have an idea of what you need, how the website is going to be layout, but you need an initial design to go off of.

I would recommend taking your site map going into like canva/photoshop/adobe XD and start working out the different pages designs so that you can build a final product much more easily.

Build

Now is the fun part: Building

So you have a solid idea of what needs to be done and how it will look.

To build a website there are 2 main approaches: Nontechnical and Developer

Nontechnical will mean anyone that just needs a website to do what they need it to do and the other is a developer that will be building the website for themselves or a client

Nontechnical

So from a basic nontechnical standpoint you have Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Etsy and then some

Basically these platforms will be easier from a non-developer standpoint because they allow drag and drop web development templates

I would recommend squarespace for something like a student resume since they offer a student discount with student email

These are all pretty straight forward, I won’t cover how to use these but for the most part they are very simple and allow some basic external code injection but this is not exactly the most effective method of building a website.

Now what I haven’t mentioned is Wordpress: about 30% or more of the web is Wordpress websites.

Now most people use Wordpress through GoDaddy since thats what the GoDaddy website builder creates.

Wordpress is just a backend framework that allows for the easiest possible content management (blogs, galleries, even stores) using php

You shouldn’t have to code anything off the bat with a Wordpress site but you do have the ability if you need or choose to do so .

You can host a Wordpress on a good number of hosts but pick what works best for you and your budget like blue host

I would also look into securing a domain as this will be important later when your setting up the DNS and SSL stuff for the website

At this point you can probably get started on your website building if you choose any of the above routes and they all allow in platform hosting which you’d pay for monthly/yearly

Technical

So now for the more technical aspects of web development

Basic, Frameworks and more.

If you have ever looked into web development then you know that websites are built using HTML,CSS and JavaScript

There are many ways to accomplish this:

• Hard Build (Natively build the website)
• Bootstrap (a library of prebuilt components)
• Frameworks (Mainly javascript libraries that allow you to build a whole web app)

I’m sure there more I’m not covering but basically those are the most common ways to build a website.

Thank you again for reading and enjoying this journey with me!

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