Skills To Learn For Front-end Web Design And Development

If you’re looking to make a career switch, or simply upgrade your current career, stepping into web design and development would be your safest bet.

There are plenty of reasons why.

Being able to code, particularly for frontend development has numerous perks. Not only does it offer higher pay but also a flexible schedule to mentally keep you at ease. Apart from these, there are many other reasons which make web a very attractive field to work in.

So, let’s take a quick look at what you need to learn in order to buzz your career up.

Start With HTML/CSS

HTML and CSS are two of the building blocks of a website. Every single website you come across while online surfing has these two as essential components of its structure. So, it goes without saying that demand for individuals with proficiency in these two languages is pretty high.

But let’s take a step back and see what HTML and CSS are all about.

HTML is a markup language which is primarily used to create web pages. On the other hand, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) presents the pages created with HTML in a stylized form.

As mentioned above, both of these languages are an absolute must to learn for a front-end developer. No HTML/CSS means no web application development.

JS/jQuery

After HTML and CSS, JavaScript is next in the line. Where HTML and CSS are all about styling, JS adds functionality to a web page.

Though a basic website may not need JavaScript, an advanced one can’t do without it. Interactive features such as audio and video players, page animations, scrolling, etc. are all implemented through JavaScript.

jQuery library is another great feature of this language. It is basically a collection of plugins and extensions that compress the lines of JS code to make it run faster on your site and we recommend learning it because front-end development is incomplete without it.

Responsive Designs

Gone are the days when only desktops and laptops were used to view websites. People nowadays have different preferences for accessing desired content. Some use desktop machines, some go with tablets, while a large majority favors phones to view web pages.

Ever noticed how those pages fit perfectly on each screen?

Yes, you got it right. This is due to responsiveness of design.

If you are to become a successful front-end developer, understanding responsive design and learning how to implement its underlying techniques through code is a must!

Testing & Debugging

Have you finished your web app development project?

Great!

But don’t sit back and relax yet! There’s still so much more to do on your end. Like testing and debugging the site to kill the bugs. In order to make an application work smoothly, you must be able to spot the bugs by testing your code along the way.

When it comes to rooting out errors, functional testing and unit testing are two of the best testing methods.

Functional testing picks up a particular piece of code and runs tests on it to make sure it performs the desired functionality. e.g. database or forms.

Unit testing, on the other hand, takes the smallest bit of code and examines it to see whether it performs the correct operation.

Considering that testing is a massive part of front-end development, we suggest you get the hang of it to flourish in the industry.

Some Other Skills to Master

• Browser developer tools
• CSS preprocessing
• CSS and JS frameworks
• Command line