Skills That A Front-End Developer Should Possess

Weh ave all had that aww moment when we came across a beautiful website and thought only if I could develop this kind of a website. Have you thought across the lines don’t know why my website design, though how well it has been designed, fails to attract people, like this design manages to? There should be some way that they have managed to get such a design up. The design elements that carry the power to attract people form the front face of any design – which is the front end ultimately.

These components make up the front-end process. The coding part of any website is majorly done using CSS, Javascript and HTML. Web designers implement these for designing web apps. As you know, the code that runs on the web server is developed by back-end developers, while the code written through front-end developer skills that runs within the user’s browser.

Back-end and front-end development should go hand in hand. While the back-end developer works on strategies that will make the entire system run, the front-end developer skills ensures that all these are well presented, ensuring a proper flow across these components, making the experience excellent for the visitors. The end product that the users derive should be perfect and serve the purpose as in all cases. The front-end developer ensures that there are no errors occurring during the working or operation of these components and the appearance of this design fits perfectly across all browsers and platforms. So it is one of the most interesting jobs and if you really like this, you should consider it as a career choice. But with time, ideas change and people’s expectations evolve, so the skills demanded from web developers change. Here let us examine some of the skills that job applicants should consider:

 CSS and HTML

The foundation for any web coding or design begins with the basic frameworks, such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). It is not possible to create a website without using these. Unless these are incorporated on to a website, only a plain website is available. In fact, you are well aware of the fact that not even a single image can be presented on a site without using HTML. So it is imperative that you are proficient in HTML and CSS. There are a lot of beginners guides available online and it would take hardly a few weeks before you master these. Now you can building some basic and simple with websites with HTML and CSS.

Front-end framework

One of the most widely used front-end frameworks include Bootstrap and they are very good at complimenting CSS just as JS Frameworks are for Javascript. With ease, you can move on with high-speed coding when combining these platforms together. The best point of being a pro in CSS is that it uses the same structure when you start coding any project. So, it is valuable to have something that gives you the same experience throughout. It is necessary that you have a clear idea of how these platforms operate across each points.

CSS Pre-Processors and Their Contribution

If you have been working with pre-processors, then you might have a clear idea of how it is important in speeding up the coding process while working with CSS. With a CSS pre-processor, we can add numerous special effects and aspects that will ensure that the CSS becomes accessible and in fact simple to manage and work on. Once the code is processed, it is ready to be published to the website. It will be presented in a perfect format and via CSS that is browser compatible. In fact, most designer jobs are looking for SASS and LESS skills.

APIs and REST-ful Services Have a Role

Representational State Transfer (REST) has a big impact on the front-end design. The major role of this framework is simplifying network communications across the web – being a lightweight architecture, this is simple and easy. In fact, APIs and REST-ful services are in line with the aspects that complement the REST architecture. With REST, you can create an app that would fetch you the details of a particular service, network or product over the web. Regardless of the service or product with which it is being used, the results or outcome fetched would always be the same.

You can fetch the data that you wish to see no matter what the service or product. This might sound to be too complex and technical. But it can be accomplished in a few simple and easy steps – making web communication easier. You can now enjoy an easier web service that performs better, and is scalable and reliable. Also you can now easily modify, add, delete or edit your web service.

Javascript

With Javascript, you can enhance the functionality of your websites. Along with HTML and CSS, you can combine Javascript to add a number of new functionalities to your site. Now you can add components that are interactive using JS. Some of these interactive elements include online games, maps that update in real time and films that are interactive. Every movement on the website becomes smooth with Javascript. Once you have this strong skill with you, it would be easier for you to find an excellent job where you can exercise your skills well.

JQuery

The combination of plugins and extensions that forms the javascript library of jQuery is what helps in moving a Javascript easier and with more speed. With jQuery, you can now introduce readymade elements, and this will not need any of you to code manually starting from the beginning. You can customize all these elements with ease. With jQuery, you can easily develop elements, such as search from autocomplete, countdown times as well as grid layout resizing and rearrangement.

Javascript Frameworks

With Javascript frameworks, such as Ember, AngularJS, ReactJS and Backbone, your Javascript code gets a ready-made structure. Based on you requirements, you can choose from a variety of frameworks. But, the above mentioned are the most important of all when you are looking for jobs. The speed of your development process can be enhanced by implementing these frameworks, which can be compiled with jQuery libraries that will help in reducing the effort involved while coding from the scratch.

Mobile and Responsiveness

These days, we find that only a handful of people accessing internet over desktops or PCs when compared with the number of people who use mobile devices. This means that both responsiveness and mobile design are an important part of the skills that employers are looking for when hunting for web designers. Now, you should be skilled at ensuring that the layout of the site fits into a device or browser across which the site is being accessed. The idea is to ensure that the users enjoy a seamless experience when they access a site via mobile, just like it would be when viewed on a PC or laptop. Mobile design refers to responsive design and also it might indicate mobile-specific designs that are created separately. When you are trying to put in some effort to give your user an experience different from PCs on mobile, you will create a separate site for mobile devices and the experiences are different from desktops.

Browser Compatibility (Regardless of the Browser)

Unlike those days when websites could be accessed across IE alone, today we have a different scenario where you can access websites pretty well across all kinds of browsers, no matter the device. Yes of course, all browsers possess a different set of standards and then being skilled at combining all these standards to make them work as expected across various browsers is what a web designer should be expert at.

Content Management Systems

These days, content management system (CMS) is a common name as it is widely used for website development. And most of us love WordPress for the number of characteristics and features that it offers. Research says that around 60% of websites that feature CMS are powered by WordPress. Apart from WordPress, we have a few other CMSs such as Drupal, Magento and Joomla, which are also quite popular. Though WordPress is under more demand, if you have a profound knowledge across the others, it would be an added benefit.

Testing is More Important

Though there are developers and designers in abundance, the number of testers are less. And so, it now becomes important that you have an excellent idea on how web development should be done, if not check out some of the best website development company India. It is important that you be clear with testing and debugging. With unit testing, you can identify and test blocks of source code, unit test frameworks, while implementing a specific method and structure to get this done. One of the other UI testing methods includes functional testing, acceptance testing or browser testing. Here you should be testing whether the website can act the way the users want these to while they are accessing the site. While debugging, we find out the errors by testing and then finding out what to do next to fix this error and make sure there are no problems on your website moving forward.

Proficient in Version Control Systems

With version control systems, you can analyse and manage the changes that are required to implement across your code every time. Also with this, you can easily go back to where you had begun all this – that is, going back to where you originally started all this.

Now you have almost covered all the skills necessary for a front-end developer. Also you should always be equipped to provide a solution to any problems that the client might face at any point of time.

Acodez is the leading web development company in India that specializes in providing the best web development services to its clients. The websites are developed keeping in mind the latest web development trends to provide you with the best looking and feature-rich website. It is due to the dedication and the excellence in the services provided that has helped us earn numerous awards since its inception.