The front end of a website is what you see and interact with on your browser. Also referred to as “client-side”, it includes everything the user experiences directly: from text and colors to buttons, images, and navigation menus.

Let’s say you decide to start a business. You open a gourmet dog treat bakery and need a professional website to present your company to customers and tell them where you’re located. Maybe you’ll include a few photos and some information about your products. All you need are frontend technologies to build your website.

Which are the main frontend development languages:

JavaScript is a programming language used for more interactive elements like drop-down menus, modal windows, and contact forms.

Together these essentials create everything that’s visually presented when you visit a webpage—whether it’s online shopping, reading the news, checking your email, or conducting a Google search. They are known as the building blocks of the internet and for good reason!

If you’re eager to get coding right away, I highly recommend you watch this video tutorial with frontend developer Abhishek. In the space of just five tutorials and a few hours, you’ll have built your very first website using the frontend coding languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript!

HTML is the fundamental coding markup language that creates and organizes web content so it can be displayed by a browser. You can learn more about HTML in our beginner’s guide.

CSS is a language that accompanies HTML and defines the style of a website’s content, such as layout, colors, fonts, etc.

So far, what you have is an example of a static website—its content doesn’t change much. For static sites, all the necessary information that determines what’s on the web page is in the frontend code itself. Static websites are good for showcasing things like businesses, restaurants, web development portfolios, or professional profiles. But if you want to turn your site into something that users can interact with, you’ll need to get more in-depth concerning what’s going on behind the scenes of the website.

The backend (or “server-side”) is the portion of the website you don’t see. It’s responsible for storing and organizing data and ensuring everything on the client-side works. The backend communicates with the frontend, sending and receiving information to be displayed as a web page. Whenever you fill out a contact form, type in a web address, or make a purchase (any user interaction on the client-side), your browser sends a request to the server-side, which returns information in the form of frontend code that the browser can interpret and display.

Your new site will need to have additional backend components to make it a dynamic web application—a website whose content can change based on what is in its database, and that can be modified by user input. This is distinct from a static website, which doesn’t require a database because its content generally stays the same.

 Ruby is another popular and anticipated open-source backend language.

This backend language is entrenched in HTML and normally used for session tracking, designing eCommerce sites and administering databases and dynamic content.

JAVA is another one of the most widely used backend programming languages which specifically follows the object-oriented programming paradigm.

 Solidity is another beneficial backend programming language used to write complex programs and applications. It is high-level programming that is contract-based.

By now, the difference between the frontend and backend should be more evident, as well as the different activities carried by developers that work on both ends of the wire. In practical terms, the frontend means the browser and the backend, the server, or, more recently, the cloud.

If you like user interfaces, are keen on sound design and like the visual aspects of creating apps, then perhaps the frontend is where you want to spend your time as a software developer. The frontend is exciting not only visually, but also from a programming standpoint; you will spend endless hours writing logic that will make your site look and behave the way the designers intended.

If you like to spend your time-solving business problems, writing algorithms, working in the cloud, and creating services and APIs, then the backend is for you.

If you enjoy both and feel equally excited and comfortable with all aspects of web application creation, then a career as a full-stack developer is what you want.

Whatever path you choose, there has never been a better time to be a software developer.

What should be learned frontend or backend development—or both:

If you’re keen to learn web development but aren’t sure whether to go down the frontend or backend route, it’s important to consider the day-to-day tasks of each. If you like the idea of working with visual designs and bringing them to life, creating a first-class user experience, then you’ll probably enjoy working in the front end.

If you enjoy working with data, figuring out algorithms, and coming up with ways to optimize complex systems, you might prefer to work as a backend developer.

However, the distinction between frontend and backend is not always so clear-cut. Some developers are proficient in both the frontend and backend; these are what’s known as full-stack developers. You can learn about them in more depth in our intro to full-stack development.

Now you hopefully have a good idea of the differences between the frontend and backend, and how they work together to create functional, user-friendly websites. To learn more about becoming a web developer, discover the kinds of skills and qualifications you’ll need in our guide.

The purpose of this blog post is to discuss front-end and back-end development and why it is important to learn them.

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