Before this time you must have visited some beautiful websites with awesome features and functionalities that must have intrigued you and then you wondered how difficult it could be or you wished you could do that. Well, all of those beautiful features and layouts are built using front-end technologies popularly known as front-end web development. Those who built it are called front-end developers.

Assuming you have done your little homework and have now decided to begin with front-end development but are still unsure where to start because of the so many options we now have available right from the choice of programming language to the tools framework and technologies to learn in 2021.

Are you ready to dive in with me? Cool! Let’s get started!

What is Front End Development?

You can think of front-end development as the part of a website that you see and interact with. Web design deals with how a website should look while frontend development is how the design gets implemented on the web. Taking the design to the real world.

Who Is a Front-End Developer?

A front-end web developer is a person who uses coding language(s) to implement web designs such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you head to any site it is the work of frontend developers you see first. The beautiful background, hovering effects, buttons even to the different views (mobile, desktop view ), etc. All are the handwork of front-end developers.

What Skills do Front-End Web Developers Use?

There are three (3) major coding languages front-end developers use. These include;

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. JavaScript

HTML and CSS: HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) are the basic building block for coding web apps. Without these two things, you can’t develop a web page. 

Mastering HTML and CSS is a must for any career path in web development. Learning these two things is fairly easy, it is possible within two weeks.

There are lots of different online courses available on how to get started with HTML and CSS. The first thing is to sign up for online courses like Creative Mansion Academy 

When you’re done with the initial courses, go ahead and practice what you’ve learned by creating some simple static pages over and over again. You can try creating simple landing pages or websites as well. The more you build the more you learn so get your hands dirty.

You can also try reading other people’s codes and breaking the codes to see how they work and read some good articles to stay up to date with the industry.

JavaScript: This is a language that lets you add a ton of functionality to your websites. It is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Regardless of your frontend dev career. It is a super valuable language to learn cause it is used in other areas aside from web programming.

JavaScript Framework: There are four main JavaScript (JS for short) frameworks which include, React JS, Backbone, Angular JS, and Ember. They actually give a ready-made structure to your JavaScript code and also speed up development.

Front-end Framework: Bootstrap is the most popular front-end framework. They basically give you a jumping-off point for faster coding. This is because most CSS projects begin with the same elements from project to project so designing a framework that defines all of these for you upfront is super valuable and most employers expect you to be familiar with these frameworks(e.g Bootstrap).

Tools: As you keep growing you’ll realize that there are tools that make your dev career a lot easier. And so you’ll keep building your toolkit. These tools include the chrome developer tool, npm, node, etc.

Version Control: You should be familiar with version control as well. This is very important because it will save you some sleepless nights. It helps you keep track of all your project files and if at any point your current code failed to work you can roll back to what was working previously. The most popular version control is GitHub.