The Foundation Post
December 9th, 2009 | by LaSean Smith
I had a recent conversation with a marketing professional about a new web technology. It was probably my fault, but they got lost along the way. They got hung up on how DNS works. From there the rest of the conversation stalled. That got me to thinking. Are we all working off the same foundation? The answer is likely no. How can we get there? Well, there is tons of incredible information on the web. Making sense of it all is the tricky part.
This posts provides links to a set of resources that can make anyone web savvy in a short period of time. Complete the free training that is referenced in the post and you could be designing web pages in a month. Mastery of almost anything takes years. The same applies here. However, you can get to a solid understanding of the technologies that power the web in a very short period of time. Check out some of these links (mostly Wikipedia) if that’s interesting to you.
How The Web Works
Some of these links get into the weeds rather quickly. However, you should have a basic understanding of concepts before you start to think about creating web experiences. Here are a few (intentionally not in alphabetical order).
- Computer
- Operating System
- Personal Computer Hardware
- Server
- Computer Network
- Web Browser
- User Experience Design
- Web Analytics
- Search Engines
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media
Web Standards (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript)
These are the core technologies that power the web today. Learn these three technologies plus a scripting language (see below) and you can design web sites.
Free Web Standards Curriculum
Ready to jump right in and learn how to create your own web sites? Check out Opera’s web standards curriculum. Great stuff.
Video & RIAs (Flash, Silverlight)
There are a number of ways to incorporate video on a website. The basic workflow is to shoot video, edit on a computer, encode for the web, upload to a web server or video service and then embed on a web page. The two technologies that matter are Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Search the web and you’ll find a number of reasons why one is better than the other. Today most web sites use web standards for the core experience and tack on Flash where they need video. You can also build entire web experiences using Flash or Silverlight. This works great if you have a Line of Business (LOB) application that gets used a lot. So when do you use web standards versus Flash or Silverlight? My advice is that you should stick to web standards if you’re creating an experience focsued on consuming content. Experiences that require users to interact with a lot of data (creating or consuming) or very rich data may be good candidates for Flash or Silverlight only sites. Many times these projects would be web applications instead of web site and are referred to as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). You can also create RIAs using only web standards, so don’t get caught up with the label. You may hear chatter about HTML5. This technology will be super important to the future of the web. However, exactly what HTML5 will be is still being sorted out. If you want to build web experiences that consumers can use today you should focus on today’s web standards, Flash and/or Silverlight.
Server-Side Programming (C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby)
If you read the links above you’ll know that servers are just computers that people access in remote places. When you write JavaScript code it usually runs on the computer that’s in front of you. When you write server-side code it runs on a server that you’re accessing remotely. There are tons of languages you could learn to program the applications that run on servers. You might use a server on a website to manage content, faciliate data entry, process emails, pull data from other sites and all sorts of things. If you are focused on content publishing I would start with PHP. If you want to build real web applications I suggest you trek over to a site like StackOverflow and let that community guide you to the language you should start with.
Databases (MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, SQLite)
Most web applications and many websites need a way to store data (e.g. content, application settings). Databases are one way to do this.
Web Services & More Structured Data
Tools
Asset Creation & More Tools
We touched on video above. There are a number of other asset types that can be incorporated into a web site or video clip. For instance, the cool intro bumper you see on a web video can be created in programs such as Adobe After Effects. Asset creation and production is a whole other discipline unto itself. There are some people who are great at video production and web design – but not many. Pick one or two focus areas if you want to ramp up fast. You pick up the basics on other areas along the way as you partner with other professionals. Here are some concepts to learn. Note, each of these type of graphics have their own set of tools from a number of vendors.
Entrepreneurship
Want to take all of this and start your own web design agency? Start by reading Seth Godin’s free ebook on bootstrapping.
