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With HyperText Markup Language (HTML for short) you lay the foundation of any website, ie the structure and content. Take for example paragraphs with text, images and hyperlinks to other pages.

HTML also contains some more complex elements such as tables, forms or playable video files. HTML5, the latest version of HTML, adds a number of important features that make writing correct HTML code more important than ever.

Whereas HTML provides the content of a website, CSS determines what this website will look like. With Cascading Style Sheets you add formatting to your website. You determine, among other things, the fonts, colours, dimensions, backgrounds, borders and margins of previously created HTML elements. Above all, you use CSS to determine the positioning of your elements.

More than half of all website visits now take place via mobile devices such as a smartphone or tablet. So it is essential that modern websites are geared to this. Modern CSS3 offers various options to achieve this, such as flexbox and the grid model in combination with media queries.

Noawadays CSS can even be used to add animations to a page. With knowledge of CSS (and HTML) you will therefore be able to accurately convert a design made by a designer in Photoshop or another graphics program into a real web page.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is now an indispensable part of the web development field. Your website may look beautiful and functionally well put together, if it is not found sufficiently on the internet then it is of little use to you.

Google has designed complex algorithms to present the most relevant search results to users on the Search Engine Result Page. The main goal in SEO is to ensure that your website ends up in a favourable position in that SERP.

JavaScript, also known as ECMAScript, is a very popular scripting language that is mainly used to make websites interactive and to develop web applications. JavaScript is in most cases executed client side (by the browser of the visitor). That means that with JavaScript you can produce the same results on different devices, provided they have a browser.

By default, nothing happens to a page once it is completely loaded. JavaScript changes that; JavaScript allows you to link certain events to user actions without having to reload the page. Consider, for example, a button that you can click to change the content (HTML) or the appearance (CSS) of the page. JavaScript is also required for the technique AJAX, with which asynchronous requests to a server can be handled.

The demand in the labour market for knowledge of JavaScript frameworks such as React and Angular has increased significantly in recent years. Nowadays it has also become easier than ever to run server side JavaScript through Node.js.

JavaScript is regularly used in combination with jQuery, an extension (library) to JavaScript. jQuery is mainly used because of the very used-friendly syntax to perform so-called DOM operations. DOM operations are operations that dynamically manipulate the textual content, HTML, or CSS of a page. jQuery also provides a simpler syntax for executing AJAX requests to a server.

jQuery is also popular as a foundation for other libraries such as jQuery UI and Bootstrap. Various external plugins including slideshows, carousels, image galleries etc. also use jQuery as a basis.

Bootstrap is a widely used, free and open source extension to CSS (and jQuery). It is used to provide web pages with a uniform, modern styling without having to write a lot of CSS code yourself.

Bootstrap comes with a built-in grid system of 12 columns that makes it easy to make a website scalable for mobile devices.

WordPress is by far the most widely used open source content management system (CMS) at the moment. WordPress was originally set up as a system to create weblogs, but nowadays you can also build websites (and even webshops) with it. The big advantage of WordPress is that you can launch a website relatively quickly without needing a lot of technical knowledge yourself.

WordPress works on the basis of themes and plugins. Themes are mainly responsible for the layout and style of the website, while plugins can add extra functionality to your installation.

PHP is the most popular server side programming language on the web. PHP is responsible for the operation of a website behind the scenes.

With PHP you can – usually in combination with a database – provide dynamic content. On larger websites, the different pages are not created one by one; instead these are automatically generated based on the available data and settings. Consider, for example, a webshop with thousands of product pages.

A static website created with HTML & CSS is by definition one-way traffic: from the web server to the user. By using PHP you can also let users exchange information with the server. Consider, for instance, the possibility to register or log in, the possibility to place an order, a search function or a contact form.

When registering on a website, it is crucial that your information is still known the next time you log in. It is also important that when you place an order on a webshop, the system registers it and automatically adjusts the stock. That’s when databases come into play. With the language SQL you can execute commands on a database.

MySQL is the most widely used relational database management system in PHP. With the MySQLi and PDO packages of PHP you will learn how to retrieve data from a database table in order to display it on a web page, or to store the data entered by a visitor in a form in a database table.

When you work with PHP & MySQL, it is vital that you learn to protect your website against hackers and others with malicious intent.

If you want to be a good programmer, it is essential that the code not only works functionally, but that it is also well put together in terms of architecture. The universal standard used in most modern programming languages for this is called Object Oriented Programming.

By working with OOP you assume that your code is composed of one or more objects. Objects, in turn, are instances of classes; kind of blueprints for your objects. The main concepts in OOP are: encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance and polymorphism.

With knowledge of OOP PHP you can write robust, modularly constructed code that is easy to maintain and in which your colleagues can find their way without too much effort. All major content management systems such as WordPress and Magento, as well as all well-known PHP frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony, are built with object oriented code behind the scenes.