Hi,
Indeed, this is a bit off topic, but I will still answer you the best I know.
While I haven’t actually made any custom websites from scratch for a while, I usually recommend staying as simple as possible. Using frameworks might not be neccessary at all, depending on the complexity of the project. The more frameworks you use, the harder it gets to maintain your code over time. If I was to make a website right now, I would choose as following:
– Server side: PHP + apache server or PHP + ngingx server. It’s fast, easy to learn, for most projects it’s more than enough.
– CSS: I use no frameworks, plain CSS, because there is a lot of dynamic CSS used in my plugins and compiling SCSS or SASS frameworks would just introduce more and more issues when generating them. If you have a huge amount of CSS code, then LESS, SCSS or SASS pre-processors are good – however I have never used any of them yet. A well structured, well documented CSS is more important, then frameworks and all that stuff.
– javascript: Same as the CSS, if no frameworks needed, don’t use any. Learning pure javascript is the key here. Once you understand how the prototypical inheritance model and the scopes and all the other javascript specific details work you won’t depend on a framework as much.
Choosing a framework is again dependent on what your application is aimed for. In most cases I would choose jQuery, because I understand it, it’s pretty fast and easy to maintain. Other very good choices are angular (for more advanced/interactive uses) and underscore js (when almost no JS is required).
Frameworks do change a lot unfortunately. I recommend mastering pure javascript, and pure CSS first. Then you will be able to see how a framework (and which) would possibly make your specific work easier. I would still stick with the major ones I mentioned, there are tons of other frameworks born every day, which get abandoned after a few weeks.
One other thing: !!!Documentation & Comments!!! – One of the hardest things for me was to maintain the code parts which I wrote god knows how long time ago. If I was documenting it properly (like I do now), it would have saved me some time. It does not matter how nice and fast your code is, if you don’t make comments, don’t structure it properly, you will get lost in it, wasting hours and hours – like I usually did before.
I believe this is honestly the best advise I can give you, but please ask others as well, I haven’t been on the non-wordpress market for a while.
I frequently read the r/webdev subreddit. You will find many useful posts there, but also ask for advice or questions about stuff you can’t find with google.
PS: I wish you the best luck, I hope my information was helpful 🙂
Best,Ernest Marcinko
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