In plain English
This is the bit you actually see. The menu, the buttons, the pictures, how everything sits on the screen when you open a site in your browser. It's built from three things stacked together: HTML for the content, CSS for how it looks, JavaScript for what happens when you poke it. Think of it like a printed menu, except this one talks back. Press a button, something happens. Simple as that, really.
A worked example
The café's homepage has a logo up top, a link to the menu, and a "book a table" button sat somewhere obvious. All of that is front-end. Someone types in the address, their browser pulls down the HTML (the actual structure, headline, photo, button), the CSS makes it look decent (fonts, colours, spacing), and the JavaScript makes that button do something when clicked. Press it, a form pops up asking for a name and a time. That's the whole front-end job done. What happens after they hit submit is a different story entirely.
Getting set up
Nothing to sign up for here, which is nice for a change. A browser and a text editor is genuinely all a front-end needs. If an AI tool is building the site for you, it's handling all of this in the background anyway. No accounts, no extra dashboards to remember passwords for.
The usual mix-up
People assume the front-end is the whole website. It isn't. It's just the bit you can see, it doesn't save anything or check anything or send a single email on its own.