Think about all the web applications you’ve used recently, whether it’s your favorite news site, Facebook, or online shopping platforms. If you’re searching for gifts, booking a hotel room, or scheduling a doctor’s appointment, the Internet is likely your first stop. Recent studies show that well over 90% of purchases begin with online research, even if they’re completed in-store.

In this digital age, it’s surprising that many businesses still lack a website or web app, missing out on the significant benefits they offer. Well-designed websites and web applications can elevate a brand, establishing it as a credible, customer-focused partner.

Our guide explores different types of web development, helping you understand which solution best suits your business needs so you can build an online presence that resonates with your audience.

What Is Web Development?

Web development refers to the entire process of building, designing, testing, and maintaining websites and web applications, as well as Progressive Web Apps. This indicates all the work web development teams put into making a web app look great, perform well, and have a seamless user experience, including web design, content development, client-side/server-side scripting, network security configuration, and sometimes SEO optimization.

In most cases, web developers build websites by writing extensive code in a text editor, styling with CSS, and integrating various components manually. While tools like Adobe Dreamweaver or content management systems (CMS) offer templates and user-friendly interfaces to simplify this process, they are less commonly used in modern workflows. Today, developers typically rely on powerful code editors like Visual Studio Code, which provide greater flexibility, control, and efficiency. These modern tools streamline the setup of new websites, allowing developers to focus more on customization and functionality rather than starting from scratch.

What Are the Types of Web Development?

Web development is commonly divided into three main types, each addressing a different layer of building a website or application. The detail of each type of software development is briefly covered below.

Front-End Web Development

Front-end web development is concerned with the visual aspects of a web page (the user interface). Web developers in this category are responsible for the appearance as well as the client-facing functionality or interactivity of the website. This includes the layout of content, navigation bars, media (text, images, and videos), animations, and so on. The main programming languages used in frontend development include HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Back-End Web Development

Back-end web developers handle the behind-the-scenes processes and functions of a website. This includes managing app services, web server logic, databases, APIs, and other features that make the website function as it should. Backend web development is carried out with various programming languages like Python, Ruby, Java, and PHP.

Full-Stack Web Development

Full-stack development encompasses the creation of both the front-end and back-end layers of a web app. Full-stack developers can handle both the server-side logic and user interface designs of a website, integrating both to deliver a full user experience. This means front-end developers use front-end technologies (like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and combine them with web programming languages for managing server-side logic. Full-stack web developers are also expected to have solid knowledge of database management, APIs, secure coding practices, and web server management.

Brief Introduction to Web Development vs. Web Design

Web development and web design are two complementary but distinct disciplines within web creation. Web design focuses on the visual and interactive aspects of a website, whereas web development involves building the functional framework that brings these designs to life. This includes front-end development, which translates design elements into code, as well as back-end development, which manages the server-side logic and databases that power websites and web applications.

You’ll learn more about the differences between these two branches of web app creation in our article comparing web development vs. web design.

Web Development Process for Beginners

Building a fully functional custom web application is a complex task. It’s even more complicated when you’re building from scratch instead of a Content Management System like WordPress or Joomla. For beginners, you have to be aware of all the stages and key steps that lead to a functional website, as highlighted below.

Information Gathering

The first step in bringing a website project to life is to research and gather all the information needed for the project. The goal at this stage is to identify the client’s needs, the goal of the project, the target audience, and the market dynamics. The information you gather in this phase will influence the design and future layout of the website or application.

Planning

Next, you need to create a detailed action plan for your project. This includes designing a sitemap, picking your programming languages or tech stack, and creating a sitemap that describes the main sections of the app. Creating a detailed plan from the outset helps to keep your project on track and minimize resource wastage due to unexpected issues.

Design

This phase involves outlining the visual component of your website. A UI/UX designer creates wireframes or mockups for your website, which will determine the layout of the site content. This must be done in full consideration of the target audience. At the end of this phase, you should have a static or dynamic image that will describe both the aesthetic details and functional components of your website.

Development

With the groundwork completed, you can now proceed to the coding phase of your project based on the approved designs. Web developers typically start by building the main page, then gradually adding the sub-pages and integrating the extra features or components.

Testing

After the coding of your website is complete, it is essential that you test all the parts of your website to ensure it all works as intended. This includes visual inspection of the aesthetic elements and functional tests to verify that all scripts, links, and features work as intended. Testing may also involve inspecting and validating the code to ensure compliance with web standards.

Launch

After final approval from the client, the web app is ready to go live. At this stage, it is important that all the files are uploaded and deployed correctly so the site functions as expected.

Maintenance

After launch, a website needs to be monitored and maintained regularly. In maintaining websites, web developers have to check for bugs, optimize performance, and carry out periodic updates to keep things running smoothly.

So, how long does it take to get your new development projects up and running? The fact is that it is difficult to say, even for a simple project. A typical project takes between a few weeks and several months, depending on the scope and complexity of the project.

Key Technologies in Web Development

To build a fully functional website or web application, web developers have to implement multiple technologies. These technologies determine the appearance, functionalities, data storage/processing, and interactivity of the website. In this section, we will explore some of the core technologies used by website developers.

Front-End Development Technologies

This refers to the core technologies that run directly in the user’s browsers. They’re also referred to as client-side technologies. Front-end technologies determine how the part of the website that users see and interact with is structured or styled. The three main front-end technologies are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

HTML

HTML, an acronym for HyperText Markup Language, provides the basic structure of a web page, defining the arrangement of elements like headings, paragraphs, images, and links. It uses tags to organize content in a clear, accessible manner, serving as the foundation that other technologies enhance. While HyperText Markup Language alone doesn’t offer styling or interactivity, it’s the essential framework for any web app.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets is used by front-end developers to style web apps, controlling visual elements like fonts, colors, spacing, and layouts. Front-end web developers use it to maintain a consistent look across multiple pages and adapt designs to different devices. By separating design from structure, CSS allows front-end developers to make efficient, flexible styling changes to the visual elements of a web page.

JavaScript

JS is a programming language that brings interactivity and dynamic behavior to static websites and web applications, making them come alive beyond static content. It enables real-time content updates, form validation, and animations, offering users a more engaging experience. With libraries and frameworks, JavaScript becomes even more versatile, powering the frontend development of advanced applications and data-driven interactions.

Back-End Development Technologies

This refers to technologies that work behind the scenes on the server side of your website to determine how the site runs, handles data, and stores information. There are different kinds of server-side programming languages that can be used to write code that will determine how a website operates on the backend. Some of these server-side scripting languages include:

Node.js

This is a popular JavaScript runtime environment that can be used to execute JavaScript code on the web server side (instead of in the browser like regular JavaScript). Node.js is typically used for building fast and scalable back-end web services.

PHP

PHP is a server-side programming language used to create scripts that retrieve information from a database to be displayed in a web browser. This technology helps you create dynamic and interactive web pages. PHP’s ability to integrate with popular database technologies also makes it an ideal tool on which CMS tools are built.

Java

Java is a versatile, object-oriented programming language known for its portability across different platforms. “Write once, run anywhere” is its guiding principle, meaning that code compiled on one platform can run on another without modification. Java allows back-end developers to build a range of applications, not just simple web apps but also mobile apps and large-scale enterprise-level web applications, offering a stable, scalable foundation.

Python

A highly readable, versatile programming language prized for its simplicity and ease of use that make the entire web development process a breeze. With an extensive library ecosystem, Python excels in web development, data analysis, automation, and artificial intelligence. Its clean, beginner-friendly syntax makes it an ideal starting point for new web developers while remaining powerful enough for complex development processes.

Databases

Websites store and organize data on the server side (backend) using a database management system. The types of data that can be stored on a website database include user information, website content, transaction information, and so on. Databases are grouped into two categories based on how they store data. This includes relational and non-relational databases. Here’s an overview of each of these database options:

SQL/Relational Database

A SQL or relational database is a type of database that stores data in tables with rows and columns similar to a conventional spreadsheet. In a relational database, each row represents an individual record, while each column represents a data attribute. Examples include:

MySQL
PostgreSQL
MariaDB

NoSQL Databases

A NoSQL database is a type of database management system where data is stored in a flexible format instead of a tabular format with rows and columns used in traditional SQL systems. In this type of DBMS, data may be stored in wide columns, graphs, or key-value pairs. The main advantage of this type of database management system is that it can handle vast amounts of unstructured data. Examples include:

MongoDB
Cassandra
Redis

APIs

In any website where components have to share information or fetch information from third-party services, an Application Programming Interface is used. For instance, if your eCommerce website needs to process payments for products purchased by users, an API can be used to connect the website with the third-party payment platform.

A full-stack web developer can use APIs in a web development process to connect front-end applications to back-end systems or third-party services, enabling dynamic features like retrieving real-time data or processing user requests.

Mastering APIs is crucial for creating versatile, interactive, and complex web applications with dynamic content. REST APIs are the most popular and flexible type of APIs used in web development. However, there are others like WebSockets, RPCs, and SOAP APIs.

Web Development Frameworks

These are tools or libraries that can be used to simplify the process of building with a specific programming language. Frameworks provide standardized structures and reusable components or commonly used functionalities that make the development process more efficient. This way, web developers don’t have to build every component of the code from scratch.

In addition to improving the speed and efficiency of development, frameworks also add structure to your code, allowing developers to write cleaner and easier-to-manage code. Some of the most popular web development frameworks are highlighted below:

Angular
Ruby on Rails
Django
React
Vue.js
Laravel
Express

Libraries

Libraries are similar to frameworks in the sense that they help web developers write cleaner and more efficient code. However, they aren’t quite the same. A library is a collection of files, scripts, or functions that developers can integrate freely into their code. They are essentially code snippets that work together to enable a specific functionality instead. While a framework defines the structure and overall architecture of a project, libraries can be freely integrated into a web build with no impact on the structure or design.

A prime example of a popular library is React. While it is often compared to frameworks like Angular and Vue.js, React is technically a library focused on building user interfaces. Developers then select other libraries to handle tasks like routing and state management to create a complete application.

Browser DevTools

Browser Developer Tools (DevTools) allow for real-time manipulation of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, providing insights into how web pages load, identifying performance bottlenecks, and debugging client-side issues efficiently. With these tools, full-stack developers can optimize their applications for speed and user experience.

Git and GitHub

Git is a version control system that allows developers to track changes in their code, manage different development branches, and collaborate seamlessly with teammates. GitHub is a popular platform built around Git that hosts code repositories, offering tools for issue tracking, project management, and collaborative coding. Together, Git and GitHub help full-stack developers maintain a clean development workflow and ensure team projects stay organized.

Web Development Best Practices

Building a website isn’t just about ticking it off your bucket list. Lots of businesses have a website these days. To truly stand out and achieve the desired results with your site, you need to follow certain principles. These best practices will ensure that your website stands out from the rest and that users get a great experience when they interact with your online services:

Make Your Website Responsive

These days, people access the internet using a wide range of devices. This means users will likely use devices with different screen sizes and resolutions to access your website. It has become standard practice for developers to create websites with fluid grids, flexible images, media queries, and other features that allow them to adapt seamlessly to different devices. These responsive design practices ensure that your website can deliver an optimal viewing experience regardless of the size or resolution of the device being used to access it.

Performance Optimization

Users don’t have the time to wait around for your website to load correctly. They want websites that load quickly and smoothly, delivering a seamless user experience. You can only achieve this if you optimize the performance of your website.

In addition to making it more likely for human users to stay on your website, performance optimization also improves your website ranking on search engines and reduces server load. In building your website, always carry out performance optimization, including minifying content, compressing images, caching, and using a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver content faster and more efficiently to your site.

Optimize for Search Engines

People mostly discover new websites through search engines. To improve your chances of getting discovered organically, your website has to be crawlable for search engines and show up high on the search results list. This is achieved by making your website as search engine-friendly as possible.

Search engine optimization begins from the web development phase of your project. This includes optimizing your website structure and navigation, using high-quality keyword-friendly content, responsive design, and the use of meta-tags. Integrating these and other SEO best practices into your project from the outset will deliver a site that ranks well on search engines.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a modern web development standard that has become quite imperative for anyone embarking on a development project. This involves making your website accessible to everyone, including people living with disabilities like blindness, deafness, and other physical handicaps. You are expected to follow standard accessibility guidelines (such as the WCAG guidelines) in website development. This includes using semantic HTML in building sites, providing text alternatives in non-text contexts, color contrasts, resizable content, focus indicators, and so on.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

Since you cannot force all users to access your site via the same browser, your website should deliver a consistent user experience across different browsers (and browser versions). This is why you should prioritize cross-browser compatibility by following standards that ensure that your website works seamlessly across different platforms. Before release, ensure that you test your website and fix any issues you might notice across different browsers.

Prioritize Security

Any website on the internet will always be prone to cybersecurity threats and the risk of data breaches or malicious attacks. To protect your website and maintain the trust of users, you need to prioritize cybersecurity in web development. This includes getting HTTPS encryption for your site, protecting user inputs, and implementing secure authentication mechanisms for your site. You also need to schedule regular maintenance, which should include updating any plugins or software connected to your site.

Web Development Tools

Typically, when people talk about web app development tools, they mean the apps and languages that allow developers to write and debug the code for web apps. But as the digital world evolves, so does the role of a web developer.

Today, they have to know more than just writing code snippets. They have to be familiar with visual aspects, UI/UX responsive design, prototyping, wire-framing, cybersecurity, SEO, and much more. The good news is that there are plenty of web development tools available now that can help developers accomplish those tasks without having to start from scratch, from design platforms like Sketch and Invision to testing programs like Postman and collaboration software like Slack and Asana.

Code Editors & Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
Sublime Text
Atom
WebStorm

UI/UX Design & Prototyping Tools

Figma
Adobe XD
Balsamiq
Proto.io

Cybersecurity Tools

Vulnerability Scanners such as Nessus or Nikto
Penetration Testing Tools such as Burp Suite or Metasploit
Firewalls

SEO Tools

Google Search Console
Google Analytics
SEMrush
Ahrefs

Careers in Web Development

As the demand for web apps grows across industries, web development has become one of the most sought-after career paths in the tech sector. The field is diverse, offering numerous opportunities that cater to different skill sets and interests. Let’s break down what a web developer does and the various types of careers available.

Who Is a Web Developer?

A web developer is responsible for creating, maintaining, and optimizing web pages or apps. Their primary role is to create fully functional and visually appealing websites that meet the goals of the client or organization that hired their services.

As explained above, a web developer may specialize in front-end or back-end development. However, some developers handle full-stack development, being proficient in front-end technologies and back-end programming languages. Developers work with other professionals like designers, project managers, testers, and so on to deliver a website that is fully aligned with business needs.

Types of Web Development Careers

The web development industry is quite diverse, with several careers and niches handled by professionals with varying levels of expertise. The following are some of the primary career categories in this industry.

UX/UI & Web Designers

Web designers, in tandem with UX/UI designers, are responsible for curating the visual and interactive elements that users see on a website. They determine the layout of content, color scheme, typography, and overall navigation of the user interface. Designers create the blueprint that the development team works with to create the website or application.

Web Programmers

Developers are also known as web programmers because they use programming languages and web technologies to bring different layers of a website to life. Front-end developers are programmers focused on the client side of an application, while back-end developers handle the complex coding on the server side. Full-stack developers are proficient in both areas. DevOps engineers are the bridge between development and operations, automating testing and monitoring to streamline the deployment of web apps.

QA Engineers

Quality assurance engineers and testers are professionals responsible for validating the functionality of a website or application. They carry out tests to identify visual inconsistencies, bugs, and technical issues that should be fixed by the development team to ensure the site is stable, secure, and user-friendly before launch.

Learning Resources for Web Development

If you’re interested in software engineering and you’d like to dive deeper into how web development works, online resources make it easier than ever before. Thousands of books, articles, webinars, guides, tutorials, and web development courses are available straight away, providing you with all about web development.

Just type “Web development learning resources” into a search engine, and you’ll get results counted in millions that will give you a solid understanding of this subject matter! But be cautious, since not all web programming courses or blogs are valuable – you can also find a lot of outdated or downright useless information from various so-called “experts”.

What are some resources you can use to learn more about building websites?

Course websites such as Udemy, Coursera, Codecademy, or TutorialsPoint.
Online communities like freeCodeCamp, Stack Overflow, Roadmap, DevChallenges, or simply boards and social media groups focused on web development.
Online study platforms like Treehouse, Scrimba, or W3Schools.
Industry blogs like A List Apart, Codrops, CSS Author, or CrustLab blog.
Newsletters like JavaScript Weekly, HTML5 Weekly, SitePoint Versioning, or Code Project newsletter.

Joining groups and forums can be a super useful way to learn more about web app development. Inside those groups, you can meet people interested in the same things as you, find mentors who can assist you with a problem, or get access to many free resources only available to members.

Factors to Take into Account When Outsourcing Web Development

You can see that there are a lot of things to consider when it comes to creating your own web app, from the type of web app to the design, security, content, and several other things. That’s why it’s so hard to estimate how much time it might take to set up your company’s main page or how much it might cost, even for an experienced software development company.

Having a ready list of needs and expectations for the website can greatly assist them in deciding how best to design your web app. What should you include inside such a list for your web app development partner?

Your main goal for the web app,
The target audience you want to reach,
Hands-on experience or client-side coding/popular programming languages to be used,
Type of content you want to have on the site, along with functionalities,
The size of your page (ideally, provide a rough structure of the page),
Your ideas for the design and images (e.g., drop-down menus, style sheets, any fundamental building block, special back-end development tactics),
The level of compatibility and responsiveness you need for your website,
The level of security you require (and scripting languages),
Where should it be hosted – locally, in a data center, or through a cloud service provider like AWS or Microsoft Azure?
Your needs regarding front-end web app development, development skills, programming language skills, or even building blocks, as well as other development basics.

However, if you don’t have a web development partner yet and you’re not really sure how to choose a web development company for your project, read our article on this topic.

Web Development Industry Trends and Insights

Any major shift in digital technology has the potential to redefine how websites and web applications are built. This is why anyone running a website or looking to create one has to keep up with the latest trends or risk getting lost or outdated in a rapidly developing industry. Below are some of the most significant web development trends in recent years.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) tops the list of the most important digital innovations of the past decade. This technology is already revolutionizing various industries, including the web development landscape.

Following the release of ChatGPT in 2022, several other tech giants have launched their own generative AI technology that can create all kinds of media and digital content based on text prompts. Today, some of these generative AI tools can also create code snippets for website features or entire websites based on expertly structured prompts.

While the use of generative AI to build websites and apps is still in its infancy, AI tools like GitHub CoPilot and GPT-Engineer are driving efficiency in other aspects of web development, particularly in streamlining repetitive tasks and automating web development processes such as setting up production environments, testing, and debugging code. These AI tools are accelerating the development process while helping developers create cleaner and more efficient code.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are apps built with modern web development technologies. These apps combine the best features of regular websites with the user experience of native mobile apps. The market for Progressive Web Apps has been experiencing an upward trajectory in recent years, with projections that it’ll reach up to $10.44 billion by 2027.

This trend is driven by several factors, including their lower cost compared to native mobile apps (PWAs can be 3 to 8 times cheaper to develop than native apps). Progressive Web Apps are also known for their potential to drive better user retention and conversion due to their faster load times and offline capabilities.

Headless CMS

Traditional content management systems are now being replaced by a headless CMS architecture. As the name suggests, a headless CMS has its backend separated from the front end (head) where the content will be displayed. The front end fetches content from the content management systems via APIs.

This decoupled architecture makes it possible to adapt content to different presentation channels. It’s a vital innovation for today’s digital landscape, where content needs to be delivered across various channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media, digital signage, and so on. Decoupling the front end from the back end also improves performance, content delivery, and scalability.

Conclusion

The benefits of web development are diverse and far-reaching. Having a strong online presence through a web app is essential for business success in today’s digital marketplace. Your web app can serve as a storefront, a communication hub, or an engagement tool, offering customers a seamless way to interact with your brand.

The good news is that achieving a fast and efficient web application is easier than ever. A full-stack web development company like CrustLab can help you quickly establish a robust web app that aligns with your brand and objectives, even if you lack coding knowledge. Let’s discuss your needs!

See all articles