Making Money with Web Designs - The Basics
Making Money with Web Designs - The Basics
Web development covers a diverse range of professions such as designers, programmers, system analysts, technical writers, search engine optimizers, database managers and animators, just to name a few.
Web development involves the creation of applications that run on the World Wide Web. These applications are fundamentally categorized as three tiered applications. The first tier or level is the web browsers such as Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Mosaic. These browsers provide the user interface for the system. The interfaces are usually shown as web pages. Web pages can be created using basic HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) to the remarkable animations of Macromedia Flash.
During the much-hyped beginnings of the Internet and World Wide Web, browsers tend to offer users with facilities and programs that are unique to each and every browser. This causes a lot of confusion on the part of the users. Furthermore, this led to the incompatibility of several web sites or web site features for some web browsers.
These incompatibility issues led to the formation of an Internet and World Wide Web body to establish certain guidelines or standards so as to prevent any further chaos in the users part and would also prevent some company from totally establishing a monopoly of web development.
The second tier or level of Web development involves several programming languages and scripts. Languages and scripts such as Perl, CGI, Php, Java server applets (JSP) and active server pager (ASP) are the more popular and commonly used languages and scripts for web development. Application from this tier establishes and controls the accessibility of information or data from a web server. These applications that are used for web development are also called server side application.
The third tier is the database. This database is usually found on a server that is remote or isolated from the clients that try to gain access or do any transactions with the system. There are dozens of web based databases such as MYSQL, Posters, MS SQL and Oracle. Databases may contain simple mailing lists to huge inventory and sales databases.
Web development involves several types of web sites that may or may not strictly adhere to the concept of a three-tiered application.
Some of these web sites are categorized as Archive Sites such as Yahoo.com, Business Site, Commerce Site such as EBay, Community Site such as Yahoo Groups, Database Sites, Development site such as Maricopa.com, Directory Site such as Google Directories, Download Sites such as Macromedia Downloads, Game Site or RPG Site such as Pogo.com, and Information Index Site such as Wikipedia.
Other forms of web sites are News sites such as CNN and Porn Sites - they thrive in the Internet. Search Engine such as dogpile.com, Shock Site such as ogrish.com (Please enter with caution), Vanity Site, Web portals and the ever popular web logs or blogs (we get the last letter of the first word and add it to logs.)
An individual or a company planning to start a web development business would be happy to know that software for web development can cost absolutely nothing. Open systems have become more popular with the Internet. An example of an open source platform would be Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php. Linux would be your Operating System. There are several versions of Linux that can be downloaded for free and have great graphical user interfaces. Examples of Linux are Fedora and Ubuntu.
Apache is a free web server that can be installed in almost any Operating System.
MySQL is popular database management software preferred by many developers. Postgres is also another free database management software.
Php have come a long way from the early days of web development. It is one of the web languages that have matured into a full feature language. Other free programming languages are Python, CGI and Perl. It is best to consider the kind of web application to develop before choosing the programming language to use.
A Web development business can be started with basically a low initial capital and can be quite profitable. It does involve to a degree of technical know-how, design savvy and an eye for aesthetics. It is a field where the competition is short of being literally cut-throat but the rewards are worth it.
Rebecca Hubbard
Hubbard Enterprises
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