Front-end development is one of the most popular career paths in the software development industry, and everyone aspiring to become a successful software developer usually decides between becoming a front-end or back-end developer. If you’ve chosen a career part of front-end development, we wrote this compelling guide that lists the skills necessary to become a front-end developer. Keep reading through this article if you want to learn more.
What is front-end development?
Front-end website development refers to a set of technologies used for making attractive and stylish website functionality visible on the client-side. The websites are coded using technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and frameworks like JQuery. There are, of course, more libraries and frameworks that contribute to a more stylish design.
Front-end development is mostly responsible for the outside appearance of the website, that is visible to the visitors, while back-end development refers to the functionality such as voting systems, registration, login, and more refined, logical approach.
One of the biggest benefits of using front-end technologies to embrace the tech industry is because it’s straightforward, versatile, and easy to learn. That’s why we prepared a list of skills necessary for every successful front-end developer.
HTML/CSS
HTML5 and CSS3 technologies are the building blocks of every website’s design. HTML refers to Hyper Text Markup Language, while CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. The HTML refers to the content of a web page, such as paragraphs, titles, headings, bullet points, list, blocks, tables and more, while CSS works as a decorator of this content. It is used for animation, coloring, positioning, resizing and other functionalities that make the website look as sleek as they do.
Keep in mind that these are the basic languages used for front-end development, but they’re not programming languages. Many tech novices mistake HTML for a programming language, but it’s not. Our client management tool offers many HTML and CSS features, many of which are already free, such as button creation and much more.
JavaScript
JavaScript is the main third demanded front-end technology after HTML and CSS. When it comes to coding languages, JavaScript was proclaimed the most popular coding language in 2018 by StackOverflow. JavaScript is an easy-to-learn scripting language that provides a lot of client-related functionalities to the website. It has a lot of frameworks and libraries, such as JQuery, Angular, React, as well as its back-end development component, Node.js. When it comes to your career development, every serious web development company will look for a knowledgeable developer with vast JavaScript expertise.
JavaScript and CSS Frameworks
Now that we’ve touched the basics of JavaScript and CSS, it’s time to take a look at some important framework combos of the two. These frameworks are a combination of CSS and JS files that get a lot of work done for you while adding more functionality.
However, choosing the right framework to suit your needs is nowhere near easy, especially because all frameworks come with their pros and cons. It’s up to you to choose them properly. While some frameworks excel at making difficult and large interfaces, there are design-related frameworks that make your content look beautiful.
Two mostly combined frameworks are Bootstrap and Angular JS. The content of the website is enabled through Angular, while the outside appearance and overall design are handled by Bootstrap, with some additional help of plain old CSS. Considering that the two technologies are the basic building blocks of front-end development, everything else that adds to them isn’t hard to overcome.
CSS Preprocessing
Traditional and plain CSS is great for adding some minimal decoration to your website. However, once you get hired by a web development company or an individual client, you’ll be facing much larger projects and demands. Because CSS is not your typical programming languages, you can’t define variables and functions and make your code more scalable.
This is where CSS preprocessing comes with features like Sass, LESS, and Stylus, which enable you to write code in the preprocessor language, which makes for a cleaner and more understandable code. The preprocess gets converted into CSS3 code and will work on your website.
Responsive design
With emerging mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, websites had to embrace new adjustments in becoming compatible with different screen sizes. Now, every website has a flexible design that adjusts to any screen resolution, without design becoming misaligned.
Understanding how responsive design works is of utmost importance for successful front-end developers, and the essential part of CSS frameworks like Bootstrap. Other than Bootstrap, developers also use Flexbox, which is a new style layout explicitly designed for CSS3, that will help you adjust your web pages to any screen size.
Testing & Debugging
Whether you’re building a website for your mom’s friend’s hair salon or a large business, you’re responsible for making your creation work. However, now and then, problems with the code known as bugs may appear, whether they are part of a tiny lack of attention or something else. As a person responsible for the application development, you need to take the necessary steps to test and eventually debug the existing issues on your website’s.
For testing whether your website works or not, there are several methods. Some of them include functional testing that focuses on an individual piece of functionality and tests whether everything works properly or Unit testing that goes into the details of your code and looks for the bugs. You don’t have to be alone in testing your projects. However, programs like Mocha and Jasmine are available to make the testing process simpler.
Other skills – Conclusion
The skills above make the basic tools required to kickstart your front-end development journey. However, if you want to improve your knowledge, it’s worth noting some other skills. One of those skills is digital marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization,) a collection of trends set by Google that improve your website’s visibility on search. Our management system, Admin12345, comes with a plethora of SEO tools, but also other excellent web design and development assets that will make your website management less of a pain.
