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It’s pretty hard to find a website these days that doesn’t use some kind of server-side scripting and a database. So many different options are available, from commercial products to open source products, that it can be really daunting to decide which direction you want to go. In the case of web servers, web scripting languages, and databases, the open source alternatives are just as good as (and in some cases, even better than) the commercial options.

By now, you should have a solid understanding of how to create web pages using HTML markup. You should understand how to encode semantic meaning into your page content, and you should be familiar with the concept of page elements and how these elements can be nested inside one another to give a page an orderly structure. Finally, you should also understand the basics of how a web browser interprets your HTML source code and determines its rendering. All of these topics were covered in the previous chapter, and all the concepts in this chapter will build on them.

This afterword will look at a few different areas on how to best conduct business as it relates to the Web. We’ve known brilliant designers who weren’t very adept at billing. We’ve known excellent developers who have had trouble getting paid because they didn’t work out the terms of an agreement before starting work. Freelancing is a very popular option among people working on the Web. We don’t know whether it’s the nature of the industry or just the personality type of the people who work online, but based on conversations we’ve had at conferences with others working in the field, there seems to be a really high occurrence of people doing side work for themselves among those employed at larger organizations. It’s not uncommon to find individuals who work in completely different fields such as print design or photography (we’ve even met a couple of licensed electricians!) to occasionally work in web development.

Up to this point in the book, we’ve covered a lot of the bases for building a website from scratch. We’ve talked about the most fundamental building blocks of the web and how to combine those together to get up and running with a website. We’ve covered using JavaScript to add some interactivity to our pages and to make things dynamic. We’ve even briefly looked at various server-side languages and systems that can help to make a website a truly dynamic system.

Now that we can construct more complex logic with loops and conditional statements, let’s take our knowledge of JavaScript to the next level.

Believe it or not, when we were kids the standard way to send a message to a friend or family member was by mail. Not e-mail, mind you, but the physical kind requiring a stamp on the envelope. Fax machines came blazing onto the scene and revolutionized communications because, all of a sudden, you could send a document across the country in a matter of minutes, rather than a number of days. Personal computers were starting to show up in houses, but they generally cost an arm and a leg, and they certainly did not have any sort of way of communicating with the outside world. For the most part, assignments in school were handwritten, unless you had a typewriter at home! It was just the standard.

In the previous two chapters, we talked a lot about the theory and concepts behind standards-based frontend web development. You learned why and how to create structured, semantically meaningful HTML5 markup. You also learned how Cascading Style Sheets work, how web browsers display HTML content by default, and how to apply your own CSS rules to web pages. It’s finally time to bring all your new-found knowledge to bear on a real project and turn your bland, unstyled web page into a beautiful, professionally implemented CSS design.