There are so many ways that one can do a website. You could for example use CMS's like WordPress and then just link a theme to it and there you have a website, or you could use framework's such as Laravel to aid in the development of a website. In this article I will address none of these and talk about the actual programming languages required to develop websites and their purpose. Let’s get started.
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is basically the foundation of any website. HTML consists of a series of short codes called tags that are saved as an html file and can then be viewed in your browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. In the browser it will then render these tags into visible form.
These tags are used to separate normal text from HTML code. They allow us to implement images, tables, forms, etc. in the browser, but the tags themselves don’t appear in the browser. Different tags have different functions. Here is an example of how a tag looks like:
<b>This part will be bold</b>, while this one will not.
You can learn more about HTML here on W3Schools or maybe even take this Lynda course.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and is used to design your website. CSS is used in combination with HTML. CSS handles the look and feel of your website, such as color of text, style of font, spacing between paragraphs, background images or color and is used to make a website responsive.
CSS is easy to learn and very powerful, but it can sometimes be tricky to implement as styles might overwrite each other and cause our design of your website to break.
You can learn more about CSS here on W3Schools or maybe even take this Lynda course.
JavaScript is a programming language used to make web pages more interactive. It runs locally on the visitor's computer. As an example if you see a rotating banner on a website there is a 99% chance that it was build using JavaScript. Basically if you want to run any kind of interactive features on your website that has to work after the web page has loaded, it has to be written in JavaScript.
There are tons of JavaScript libraries out on the internet that allow you to create some really amazing things or even to make the writing of JavaScript a lot easier, such as the jQuery library.
You can learn more about JavaScript here on W3Schools or maybe even take this Lynda course.
PHP stands for Hypertext Pre-Processor and is the most popular scripting language on the web. PHP is used to create username and password login pages, checking information supplied from a form and a lot more. PHP is a server-side scripting language, that means that the code is executed on the server and the end result is send to the browser.
What makes PHP so popular is how easy it is to use, but it is also known as a very messy programming language as you can implement in anywhere on your HTML document and the code still runs.
You can learn more about PHP here on W3Schools or maybe even take this Lynda course.
MySQL is a relational database management system. MySQL is in other words a database software that store your information.
Think about it like this, if you have a login system you will have to store the correct username and password somewhere so that you can compare it to the information supplied by the visitor. This is where a database is used. It stores relevant information and MySQL is the software that enables you to retrieve of that information possible. MySQL is mostly used in combination with PHP. PHP is used to set up the connection to the MySQL database and then you use the SQL scripting language to retrieve the information.
You can learn more about MySQL & PHP here on W3Schools or maybe even take this Lynda course.
