Front end

Intro to Front End Web Development

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• published: 18 Aug 2014
• views: 110427

Let’s talk front end, I don’t have a bad front end either right? Front end is all the stuff that makes the web look and feel sexy. We’re talking stuff like HTML, CSS and javascript. This is your HTML (beat). This is your HTML in the browser (beat). And this is your HTML on CSS, like LSD for you webpage. Any questions? HTML structures the content in a webpage, but CSS was created to give it a little more swag, it even stands for Cascading Style Swag. Just kidding. It’s actually Cascading Style Sheets. HTML just isn’t that sexy by itself, so CSS makes it easy to change things like font size and color. CSS3, and HTML5 are the newest versions of HTML and CSS, and are so hot right now. Then we’ve got Javascript. Every modern browser has javascript built in an it lets you do all kinds of cool stuff to make the web more interactive. Javascript is kind of a pain in the ass to write, so people use Javascript libraries, like jQUERY to make it easier. The javascript world is changing fast too, for two reasons. CSS3 and HTML5 are starting to do a lot of the cool ‘look and feel’ things javascript to do, and two, there’s new javascript frameworks and platforms, like Backbone and Node.js that are taking the language to the next level. Now, you could start put all this together by yourself, but that’s reinventing the wheel. There are already frameworks and CMS systems to get a site up and running really fast. For the front end there’s HTML5 Boilerplate and Bootstrap that include all the best practice HTML, CSS and javascript. If you wanted a backend framework you can use Ruby on Rails, Django for Python and all kinds of different ones for PHP, like Yii or Zend. Or you could use a CMS. CMS stands for Content management system. Two of the most popular ones are Wordpress and Drupal. They’re both written with PHP, but provide you pretty much everything you need out of the box to make a simple website with only a little knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP. Just explore your options, there’s always something out there to make your life easier. Easy is good. Remember, great programmers are lazy and never do more work than is necessary. Next we’ll talk about the tools you’ll need on your computer to become the next internet bajillionaire. Like Zuckerberg, zoiks!