Steps to Get You Started With Front-End Development

by Stephen Foster Tech Guy

With the rapid advancements in digital tools and technologies, web developers need to keep themselves abreast of changes and updates. Front-end development is a much-needed skillset for developing compelling UX designs. If you are a newbie and want to be a skilled front-end developer, you need to know as to where to start and how to gain maximum leverage from your skills.

Considering a plethora of choices before you regarding programming languages, tools, technologies, and frameworks, you need to start it right. Your interest, passion, and motivation to learn new things daily will enable you to make yourself a better front end developer.

Here is a checklist of important things to do that will empower you to deliver quality Front-end services and develop outstanding UX designs with user-friendly visual and interactive elements for seamless browsing.

Start with the Basics: HTML and CSS
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are structure and style sheet language that helps in structuring and presentation of web pages. These are the building blocks of web development and you need to learn them from reliable online/offline sources.
HTML is like the skeleton of a body while CSS is the make-up or styling of the same. You can start building responsive layouts using a specific color, sizes, animations, and more with CSS. Spend time in coding to be efficient in it.
Learn JavaScript
JavaScript is an essential programming language that every web developer should learn. Being the most popular and fastest-growing web language, it adds interactivity to your web elements. Several websites use JavaScript for client-side page behavior. When you use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together, the sky is the limit as you can develop any web application.
Get a Job as Front-end Developer
You can land your first job as a front end developer with the knowledge of HTML and CSS. Knowledge of syntax and JQuery will be an added advantage. A job will provide you opportunities to work with seniors, learn new things, and use your skills for providing front-end services and developing websites. You need to show your motivation to learn and being always open to ideas and learning to get the first job.
Know the Tools and Frameworks
The knowledge of tools is very important as it will help you automate your workflow and make your life easier. You will find tools like Chrome developer, npm, bower, and node to be quite useful that will facilitate you in learning and working on web development projects.
Besides this, you need to gain in-depth knowledge of various CSS frameworks (Foundation, Bootstrap) and JavaScript frameworks (AngularJS and React), their features, and functionalities. This will help you choose the most suitable tools and frameworks as per your development requirements.
Get involved with open source projects
You can write codes on issues of repository and contribute to FOSS on GitHub. This will help you establish good practice and you will be able to build a credible online brand. The right learning habit and practices will make you an excellent front-end developer.

Well begun is half done. When you start in a well-planned and organized way and remain consistent with your learning, you will soon find your career as a front-end developer scale new heights.