Throughout your journey as an entrepreneur and business owner, you’ll come across all types of jargon that are important to understand especially if you want to make it far in the business. One of the most underused and often ignored terms when speaking about web design for your business is the “back end”. As the name suggests, it’s to do with the “back” of your website–but that’s still a little vague, so let’s delve into the importance of the back end and why it should be a major concern to you no matter what you sell on your website.
The Front End
First, let’s talk about the opposite – the front end. The front end of a website is what you see on the surface. It’s the parts that you interact with, the colorful bits, the menus and the overall design of the website. It’s known as the front end because, much like a store, it’s what you see on the surface. The design is something that you might personally concern yourself with but, after a while, you’re going to need to focus on the functionality of everything and not just the overall design or look.
The front end is important because it’s not just the design that matters but also the usability. For instance, if you’re planning to try and appeal to mobile users, then you need to program the front end of your website to work on smaller screens.
The Back End
The back end is where the magic happens. Much like an actual store, you’re going to see most of the inner workings of your website in the back end. For example, the interface and systems that are added to a website to accept payments is are called eCommerce modules. Companies like Blue Snap offer these eCommerce modules and they make it incredibly easy for you to install these especially if you’re using a popular website builder like WordPress. It’s a bunch of code and programming that essentially allows you to accept payments and operate a store automatically with minimal manual effort on your part.
The back end is also where things like server information are stored. A good example of this is with customer data like login information. Many websites ask their readers to sign up or register so that they can send discount codes or save order history and information. All of this data is stored by the website and saved so that it can be referenced or used in the future somehow. In other words, the back end is virtually required and it’s not just looks that matter.
Essentially, you can think of the back end as an integral part of your website that holds all of the information and allows for complicated coding to be used. This improves the functionality of a website so that it’s no longer just a pretty face and it can actually be used for other purposes. While it might be hard to grasp this concept, it’s extremely important that you understand these two jargon words.
