For very large business bodies, the development team is usually made up of hundreds of employees or developers. Smaller organizations usually hire a single webmaster to do this job. There are secondary employees as well who perform the jobs of graphic designers or technicians. Web development is essentially a collaborative effort.
Web development has been a growing industry since the mid 90s. To add to this, the cost of web development has also come down to a huge extent. A person can now develop a decent website with little money. That is the charm of the World Wide Web. A number of companies have also come up that help people design and maintain their websites at negligible rates.
Softwares like Dreamweaver and others have made it possible for a layman to build and develop a website with ease.
The work culture has also changed in the software scenario. Instead of resorting to the age old technique of executing code on a local host machine, users are now interacting online in order to create new content. This has broken all barriers in communication and has created newer methods. Users can now interact with new applications and interfaces from various locations.
Web development has caused serious transformation in communication and commerce. An example of this would be eBay.
Online auctions and other interactive processes have literally changed the way in which people used to purchase their goods earlier. Also social networking sites like orkut and face book have created a path breaking method of communicating freely over the Internet.
Web development has several subdivisions and hierarchies. We shall enlist a few as follows:
Client side coding: AJAX provides various techniques of utilizing the JAVA script and other languages to improve the user's experience.
JavaScript is a ubiquitous programming tool.
Server side coding: this includes ASP, cold fusion, CGI, C server scripts, java, lotus domino, PHP, python, ruby, Smalltalk, SSJS and Web sphere.
(Client + server) side: Google web toolkit, pyjamas and tarsus would best illustrate this.
Another very important concept that we need to know is database technology. Database technology is the basic backbone of any information system. A few examples would be apache derby, DB2, firebird, Microsoft SQL server, MySQL, oracle, etc.