To create a website, there is the design and there is the development. There has been a lot of discussion about what things the two should do when it comes to making a website up and running.
Putting them together is like pouring oil to water. They are both liquid, but they won't merge as one.
Design is one thing, and it's one part of the equation; it's the one that makes a website look and feel. It's the visuals, the cues and the guidance of what should and could happen. The design of a website can be considered as the frontend part. It's relative but it's seen.
Development is the other part of the equation. It's more like the gears and cogs with the lubes to keep things running. It's the codes, the server, the things that work behind the scene to accomplish one common goal. Working on the backend, we may not see them. But a website won't work without them.
Now that we know what they are from far, let us look at them closer, one at a time.
The Frontend, The Visuals That Please
When we first visit a website, we are greeted with its design. From the logo up above, what we see afterwards usually consists of the site's navigation menu, main content section, sidebar if available and footer. This is the frontend part of the site.
This is part of a website that we can see and interact with.
The front-end of a website usually consists of two parts: web design and front-end web development.
In web design, a website's structure is laid out. It's the look and feel and makes the character that then creates the brand image; it's something that can be remembered and recalled. The front-end of a website is mostly about designs and more designs, but can also include some codes.
Web designers work on HTML and CSS, also with JavaScript and jQuery.
The Backend, Where The Magic Happens
What we see when browsing to a website is limited to the interaction we can make through our web browser. While the things we can do are limited to there, what works behind the scene is doing the heavy lifting to compile what the website should do.
The backend usually consists of three parts: server, application, and database.
When we visit a website and click on its username and password field, we are interacting with the front end. But once we enter our credentials, we're not anymore interacting with the frontend. For a brief moment before the website knows who we are, it's the backend's turn to work.
Information we entered to a website's frontend, will be sent to the backend where the server works on the database. The backend of the website will check our login data with the data it already has. If they query matches, we're then allowed to enter. And here is the backend's work end, for now.
On this occasion, the website knows who we are because we've registered to it before. The data about us are stored on the website's server so anytime we want to log back into it, what we need is the login credential to match what the website has in its server's database.
Backend technologies usually include programming languages like PHP, Ruby, Python and others. There are also frameworks like CodeIgniter and Ruby on Rails, Cake PHP and others. What they do is to run in the background, providing the base for the frontend to work. And as for the database, there are MySQL, PostgreSQL and others.
Conclusion
Talking about frontend and backend of a website, is like talking about its design as opposed to development. They're the parts that create and make a website, and one should coexist with the other.
As the modern web progresses further, the lines between those two seem to get more blurry as frontend and backend parts of the web comes together. What's more, many modern web designers have now know how to develop the backend, and many web developers that were previously keen on the backend part of the web can now do great designs.
But still, fundamentally, they couldn't be any different.