Questions on Web Dev

Hi all, I have a few questions about web development. I’m at the point where I can create decent static websites with HTML and CSS. What I don’t know is:

  1. How to publish a website on the internet instead of just being on my computer.

  2. How to receive and process input entered on a website. For example, I can create a contact form, but when someone enters their name, email, and phone number, how to I make sure it goes to the right place? Do I need to know JS or back-end for this? Does a web hosting service like BlueHost take care of this?

  3. How do I ensure the safety of a website? If people are entering personal information in a contact form, how to I make sure that information is secure?

If you guys could point me to any helpful resources on these issues, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Thanks!
Ryan

Regarding the first question, if you just want a front end page you can host one using github pages for free. Great starting place. If you need a back end/database you will need to host it using someone like bluehost, godaddy, etc.

For the last 2 questions you’ll learn this in the last two sections “APIs and Microservices” and “Information Security and Quality Assurance”. It highly depends on what you want to do with the data. If you simply want a contact form you could learn how to do this using google pretty quickly.

1 Like

How to publish a website on the internet instead of just being on my computer.

You need web hosting. As wedge mentions, you can put things up on github pages, like test things or a portfolio, but that won’t work for a client. He mentions a few hosts - I use bluehost.

How to receive and process input entered on a website. For example, I can create a contact form, but when someone enters their name, email, and phone number, how to I make sure it goes to the right place? Do I need to know JS or back-end for this? Does a web hosting service like BlueHost take care of this?

It depends on what you want to do with the data. If you want to save it, then yes, you need a backend. Some hosting services provide backend, sometimes at a premium and sometimes in certain languages. You can also build a free server on something like heroku, but it not be the fastest - but it may be all you need. You can have a server on heroku and use something like mlab to store the data. I haven’t done it yet, but I think firebase will do a lot of this.

How do I ensure the safety of a website? If people are entering personal information in a contact form, how to I make sure that information is secure?

That’s a huge subject. Https helps.