Web development is the work involved in developing a web site for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network).Web development can range from developing a simple single static page of plain text to complex web-based internet applications (web apps), electronic businesses, and social network services. A more comprehensive list of tasks to which web development commonly refers, may include web engineering, web design, web content development, client liaison, client-side/server-side scripting, web serverand network security configuration, and e-commerce development.

Among web professionals, "web development" usually refers to the main non-design aspects of building web sites: writing markup and coding. Web development may use content management systems (CMS) to make content changes easier and available with basic technical skills.

There are many open source tools for web development such as BerkeleyDB, GlassFish, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and Perl/Plack. This has kept the cost of learning web development to a minimum.