It’s come to my attention that a lot of people are becoming more and more interested in the development of a site and what it consists of. So I decided to go ahead and write a real short intro of the main things you need to start knowing to become a good web developer for those that are interested.

Now there are many ways to develop /create a website these days. Breaking it up into three categories: Static Websites, Dynamic Websites, and Flash Websites. Each of these may use a combination of coding languages or just one language through out.

Static Websites - Mainly do not change over time and stay fixed with whatever was first established into it, usually with no database or server-side scripts feeding it new content.

Dynamic Websites - These can have minor or major updates driven dynamically by a database or server-side scripts, these are websites such as blogs, content management systems, forums, e-commerce sites, etc.

Flash Website - May have similar traits of the two mentioned above, but in my opinion, it’s in a different class all by its self. It’s more animated with less limitations then working with actual coding, although it has its major cons due to the fact that it is not good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

The question is, what type of Web Developer would you like to be? Maybe you want to learn several ways to code a website. In any case, here is some useful information to get you started.

Front-end Coding
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• HTML -
  Is the predominant markup language for the creation of web pages.
• XHTML -
  Is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but a stricter syntax. Whereas HTML is an application of SGML, a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. Because they need to be well-formed, XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed using a standard XML library—unlike HTML.
• DHTML -
  Is a collection of technologies used together to create interactive and animated web sites by using a combination of a static markup language (such as HTML), a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript), a presentation definition language (Cascading Style Sheets - CSS), and a Document Object Model.
• CSS -
  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.
• Ajax -
  Is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is meant to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability. Like DHTML, LAMP and SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies.

Server & Server-side Scripting (also known as Back-end coding)
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• Ruby on Rails -
  A web application framework released in 2004 that aims to increase the speed and ease of web development.
• PHP -
  Common opensource solution based on including code in its own language into an HTML page.
• ColdFusion -
  Cross platform tag-based commercial server side scripting system.
• JSP -
  A Java-based system for embedding Java-related code in HTML pages.
• ASP -
  Microsoft designed solution allowing various languages (though generally VBscript is used) inside a HTML-like outer page. Primarily a Windows technology, but with limited support on other platforms.
• Lasso -
  A Datasource neutral interpreted programming language and cross platform server.
• SMX -
  Lisp-like opensource language designed to be embedded into an HTML page.
• SQL -
  This is the most popular computer language used to create, retrieve, update and delete data from relational database management systems.

Flash(Documentation)
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• ActionScript (Flash Developers) -

A scripting language based on ECMAScript, primarily used for developing for the Adobe Flash Player.

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Now don’t feel overwhelmed by all this, it’ll all come together. Let me give you some direction on where to start. Right now the big thing is making websites that are Web Standard Compliant (i.e. W3C Valid XHTML 1.0 strict), utilizing CSS style sheet for the design aspect. So learn how to make a site using XHTML and CSS. Maybe try Ajax for some usability features on your site as well.

After you’re comfortable with the above. You’ll probably want to include some dynamic markup, so try using a popular Server-side script - Ruby on Rails, PHP, ASP and JSP are the most popular, so start with one of those and keep going forward from there. You’ll also need a database so make sure you learn SQL.

Don’t try to learn everything at the same time, break it up, one step at a time and you’ll be ready for anything.

Anyways, you’ll come to a point where everything looks like it relates to one another, and it does. Most languages where based off one another, so it’ll be quite simple to hop around and learn a new language. Apart from learning the languages you find most interesting, make sure to read up on web standards, accessibility, and usability - these are some core issues in Web 2.o.

To get more info on any of these things, my recommendation would be to just jump onto W3Schools (a great and free resource to get you started) or conduct your own search on Google for each of the terms I listed above. If you have any questions, just let me know below, I’ll be glad to help out or point you in the right direction.

That’s my 2 cents hope it helps.