Definition of a web development company
A company that refers to itself as a web development company, will most likely be involved in web development and web design activities. Web development involves developing a web site for the Internet (WWW - World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing a simple plain text page to a highly complex application. Some of the terms used to describe web development include web content development, web engineering, client-side or server-side scripting and e-commerce development. For further information on web design, please refer to our web design article.
Web Development
Web development usually refers to the non-design elements of creating web sites. For example, writing HTML markup and web coding (PHP). Web development can also mean the development of content management systems or CMS. We use a CMS in most of our web designs as it allows our clients to easily maintain their websites.
Large web development companies can consist of very large web development teams (hundreds). Facebook is a good example of a company that employs hundreds of web developers to maintain the Facebook code base. Smaller web development companies usually only require a single web developer. There are 3 types of web developer specialization; Front-End Developer, Back-End Developer, and Full Stack Developer.
Since the commercialization of the web, web development has been a booming industry. The main driving factor contributing to the growth, has been businesses wishing to use their website to sell products and services to customers. Open source software has reduced the cost of web development and includes full stacks for developing websites. For example LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). The vast amount of tools available for free has allowed developers to build more dynamic and interactive websites.
Web applications can also be packaged as web services which allow a users remote application to interrogate these services from other web or pc based applications. These web services can be called from many locations, and are not tied to a specific environment. Good examples of highly complex web development applications include eBay and Amazon. Web applications such as WordPress (CMS) have allowed for the easy creation of websites and blogs. Websites have evolved from very simple pages to highly complex and interactive web applications and serve a much broader purpose such as communication and social networking. Websites such as Facebook and Twitter are good examples of large interactive web applications.