understanding web development more?

Have a look at this video from Ryan Carson who gives a high level overview of what happens in the tech industry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5qpS_D8Law

When you've given it a good look, have a look at the range of Tracks Treehouse offers. What interests you the most? What do you think suits your goals.

I recommend starting from the Web Design Track. and going from there. Whatever route you choose, learning Web Design will give you the foundations you need to start from.

It's probably easiest at this point to think of a web site as a stack, with it's various layers.

At the base layer is your database. This could be mysql, postgresql, sqlite, etc. There are more options here, and they have their differences, but generally they accomplish the same goal, they store data.

Than you have your back end, or server side language. This is the code the server interprets, and it's job is to handle a request from the user, process it, ask the database for any info it needs, and than return the information to be viewed in the browser. These are your langagues like PHP, Python, Ruby, and more recently, we know have server side javascript like Node.js, which is javascript that runs on the server, not the client's browser.

Not requrired, but there are MVC frameworks (Model - View - Controller) that are built in these back end languages. Php has Laravel, Ruby has Rails, and Python has Django. There are more. But all a MVC really is is a structure to organize your code. You can learn more about MVCs in blogs and here at Treehouse.

Next you have your HTML, CSS, and javascript, that run in the client's browser. The browser gets this code from the server, and is responsible to parse it into what you see on the monitor.

Ajax blends from end and back end by being able to send data to the server, and get a response without a whole page refresh. Usually you have to refresh the page to create a new request from the server for information, but with ajax you can do that without refreshing the page. It is a great way to update portions of the ui (user interface) Ajax is client side javascript. While you can build anything you want without ajax, it does significantly help ux (user experience) when used correctly.

Which leads to ux and ui. Two terms not to be confused. Ui is an important part of UX. The user interface is the layout, design, colors, etc. A good ui helps with a great ux, which is user experience. UX includes a bigger picture like how fast the site loads, how easy it is to use, ect. It's a full picture deal.

Hopefully that helps, if you start from the beginning here, there are a lot of courses that start to explain this better than I can how thing start to fit together.