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Web development

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Web development is a broad term that incorporates all areas of developing a web site for the World Wide Web. This can include graphical web design, actual coding of pages, backend programming, and web server configuration. However, among web professionals, web development usually refers only to the non-design aspects of building web sites, e.g. writing markup and coding.

For larger businesses and organizations, web development teams can consist of hundreds of people, while smaller organizations may only require a single webmaster.

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Web development as an industry

In the last ten years, web development has been one of the fastest growing industries in the United States. In 1995 there were less than 1,000 web development companies and in 2005 there are over 30,000 such companies. The web development industry is expected to grow over 20% over the next 5 years. The growth of this industry is being pushed by large businesses wishing to sell products and services to their customers and to automate business workflow.

In addition, cost of web site development and hosting has dropped dramatically in the past few years. Instead of costing tens of thousands of dollars, as was the case only five or six years ago, you can now develop a website with only a few hundred dollars.^{[citation needed]} This fact alone has manifested into many people around the globe setting up new websites daily and thus contributing to increase in web development popularity. Another factor that has been a major contributor to web development efforts is easy to use software such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, and many more alike. Using such software, virtually anyone can develop a webpage in matter minutes. Knowledge of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), or other programming languages is not required.

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