The explosion of the Web
By the turn of the century, every company wanted to have a webpage. Web pages were created by linking more web pages, with information about the company or just the owner of the site. The latter was made possible by smart ISPs that also offered web hosting. People have to be able to access your site even while you or your computer is sleeping; so these services offer 24/7 uptime to put your HTML files. Web hosting companies also take care of getting you a domain name, such as www.thecoolestphotographer.com.
At some point, obtaining the domain name you wanted was bordering on another browser war, as there could only be one xyz.com, and if some entrepreneurial folks thought that having xyz.com first would be worth money, they would grab it.
When I wanted one for myself, paulwellens.com was already taken by a British rugby player, so I went for www.paulpwellens.com (P is my middle initial). I am neither British nor a rugby player so this was fine with me.
So a lot of pages were created worldwide, but all they had initially was information for you to look at, nothing else. In some cases, they were created once and never updated. That fortunately was the exception to confirm the rule. Many companies decided that they had to have a presence on the web and corporate websites were thus created. The advent of CSS facilitated this a lot, as it allowed the separation of presentation and content. That way, the marketing department would provide the corporate logo, and the look and feel, and all the other departments would provide the content.
Amazon.com and e-commerce
Some creative minds realized that the Web presented an opportunity to do more than just provide information. It is only a (relatively) small step from providing the information of the products you have on your site, to actually selling them. E-commerce was thus born. Amazon comes to mind as a good example of a site that everybody can relate to as being a Web shop. Developing a web shop of course involved a lot more than having someone in the company type in some content.
These products are real products; they sit in a warehouse, have a part number, a price, a name and description, different sizes and colors, and so on. That information, more than likely, is already present in some database that is updated each time a product is sold in a retail store. To sell something online, your webpage has to interact with the visitor, present him with some kind of an on-screen shopping cart, calculate subtotals, check warehouse inventory, and so on.
To do this, more and more programming was involved, and not just data entry into an HTML file anymore. So the job of Web Developer was born. Traditional programmers are skilled in a single programming language (Java or C++) and usually a single platform (Solaris or .NET). Web Developers have to be fluent in at least four different languages, as well as know a thing or two about databases. I would like to add one aspect which, to me, makes this job very exciting—one gets to be involved in design aspects. The gap between a Web Designer and a Web Developer is narrowing. So today, one talks about Front-End and Back-End developers.
So this is what we will teach you in this book; how to be a Web Developer, but not before wrapping up our history lesson. There are a few more things that made the web what it is today.
Google and Yahoo!
So you have a website with information, or a web shop because you are selling something on the web, like www.mycoolproduct.com. How do you expect to reach your potential customers, call every single one of them? This is where Google or Yahoo fit in. These popular companies developed the so-called search engines. You want to find out everything there is to know about a movie you just watched, a song you cannot remember the name of, or simply the phone number of your favorite restaurant? You visit
google.com, yahoo.com, or equivalent sites and type in what you are looking for. Chances are you will find it.
We did a usability study at work where we gave one group a set of CDs, a stack of manuals, and a computer to install; the other group did not get the manuals but Internet access. The second group did way better because they felt they did not need the manuals, as they assumed them to probably be out of date, and immediately looked things up online. And this happened over 10 years ago.
Today, the use of search engines is so commonplace that terms like Yahoo! and Google are used as verbs. In some languages, they actually have become verbs and made it into the official dictionary.
Social networking
I know people who do not use Facebook today, but I do not know anybody who does not know of Facebook. For years I walked by the building where Facebook had its office. I was not really interested. Then, when I moved back to Belgium, I decided to join them so I could stay in touch with my friends in California, who live in a different time zone and several thousands of miles away. From one of them I found out that the Facebook folks have since moved into the building where I used to have my office. Funny how that goes sometimes!
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn are examples of popular social networking sites. Nothing is sold here, but shared. People share pictures, stories, events, thoughts, ideas, opinions, and so on.
