A web developer is at heart an interactive artist. They’re someone driven by a deep desire to create things. A web developer’s canvas is a user’s web browser.
Much like how a curious child takes pleasure in making toys by joining LEGO blocks – and then experience a similar joy in taking things apart to see how they’re made, a web developer’s job is to use the basic building blocks of the web (like HTML, CSS and JavaScript) to create something complex like a webpage.
It is also the web developer’s job to diagnose problems in a website’s functionality, to understand how something works by reading the code behind it, and to make changes to fix any issues. That essentially makes web developers the physicians of the world wide web. When we talk about the world wide web, we’re mainly referring to websites and web applications.
A website is usually a simple page or group of pages. However, modern websites are much more than that. It has a nice interface that, once opened, looks very much like a desktop software like Microsoft Office. Such complex websites are often termed web applications. A web developer today is expected to know how to create and work with web applications.