Based on my experience this 6 front end developer skills are very important to master first if you are interested to learn this skill. Listed below are the things you should focus into:

HTML/CSS

You will going to encounter always this two terms when you want to be a Web Developer. There’s a good reason, though. You won’t find a single front end developer job listing that doesn’t call for proficiency in these two languages.

So let’s take a step back and look at what HTML and CSS are.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language used to create Websites or web pages. A markup language is your way of making notes in a digital document that can be distinguished from regular text. It’s the most basic building block you’ll need for developing websites.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the language used to present the document you create with HTML. Where HTML comes first and creates the foundation for your page, CSS comes along next and is used to create the page’s layout, color, fonts, and…well, the style!. Let’s say a skeleton is the HTML and skin is the CSS.

Both of these languages are absolutely essential to being a front end developer. Simply put if there is no HTML/CSS then there is no web development.

JavaScript/jQuery

The second MAJOR tool in your front end development list is going to be JavaScript (JS). Where HTML is a markup language and CSS is a style sheet language, JS is the first language I’ve mentioned that’s a bonafide programming language. What’s the difference? Well the HTML and CSS determine the presentation of a page in a site, JS determines the function.

There are also instances that a very simple website or web page is fine, but for situations where you need interactive features like the page will not load every time there is a new action to be made—audio and video, games, scrolling abilities, page animations—JS is the tool you’ll use to implement them (though as CSS evolves, it’s starting to handle a lot of these duties as well).

jQuery will going to take a common tasks that require multiple lines of JS code and compresses them into a format that can be executed with a single line. This will be a big help when you’re coding with JS.

Responsive Design

Most of this days when you are going to view a website, their is like 30% on my own opinion uses (Desktop or Laptop) to view your site. The days of desktop (or even laptop) PCs being the only way of viewing websites are so far gone.

These days we using computers, phones, and tablets to look at web pages. Ever notice how these pages adjust themselves to the device you’re using without you doing anything on your end? This is due to responsive design or should we say mobile responsiveness. Understanding responsive design principles and how to implement them on the coding side is key to front end development.

One cool thing to keep in mind regarding responsive design is that it’s an intrinsic part of CSS frameworks like the aforementioned Bootstrap. These skills are all interconnected and so as you learn one you’ll often be making progress in the others at the same time.

Testing/Debugging

From a website for your wife’s yoga lessons business to an international site for ecommerce madical site, bugs are a reality of the development process. In order to keep things moving you’ll need to test your code for bugs along the way, so the ability to test and debug makes the list of essential skills for front end developers. If you are lazy to test or debug your site, For sure along the way you will find a lot of errors occuring.

There are a couple of different testing methods for web development. Functional testing looks at a particular piece of functionality on your site (like a form or database) and makes sure it does everything you’ve coded it to do.

Unit testing is another method. It tests the smallest bit of code that’s responsible for one thing on your site and examines it individually for correct operation.

Testing the CSS and the Website Responsiveness on your site will also help you determine whether your site is responsive in an iPhone 5/6/7/8, samsung, tablets or other branding with different sizes of phones.

Code/ functionality testing is a big part of the front end development process, but fortunately, it’s another area where there are frameworks to help you.

Browser Developer Tools

The users will be interfacing with your websites through a web browser like google chrome, firefox, opera, internet explorer, etc. The way your site is rendered by these browsers is going to be a big part of whether your work is successful or not.

Also the same as testing and debugging, all modern web browsers come equipped with developer tools. These tools allow you to test and fine tune your pages in the browser itself, in ways specific to how the browser is interpreting your code.

You will going to encounter this kind of problem where your font’s are fine in google chrome and then its broken in Internet explorer. It is really an advantage for having a browser developer tools in chrome or in other browsers because you can figure out what is the problem and what needs to be fix.

Specifics will vary from browser to browser, but browser developer tools generally consist of an inspector or inspect element and a JavaScript console. The inspector allows you to see what the runtime HTML on your page looks like, what CSS is associated with each element on the page, and also allows you to edit your HTML and CSS and see the changes live as they happen. But when you edit it live it will not be save on the database itself. The JS console allows you to view any errors that occur as the browser tries to execute your JS code.

Building and Automation Tools/Web Performance

You might be seeing a pattern that HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the three primary tools for front end development and this are the main recipe for being a front end developer. Meanwhile, most of the other skills either help make those tools more efficient or help test your site and fix mistakes. The trend continues here with building and automation tools and web performance.

You can code the coolest website ever but if it performs sluggishly on the user’s end and it won’t matter. Web performance speaks to the amount of time it takes for your site to load. Try to get the URL of your site and go to GTmetrix or Webpagetest sites, enter the URL of your site and hit enter, after that you will see the results on how fast your site. If you’re having problems with performance times there are steps you can take to improve them such as optimizing images (scaling and compressing images for web performance) and minifying CSS and JavaScript (removing all unnecessary characters from your code without changing functionality). But be very careful in optimizing CSS and JS for this methods sometimes will break your site. And be sure to backup first your site before doing any improvements.

Carrying out these tasks that lead to better web performance can be another front end time-sink, but that’s where building and automation tools come in. Plugins like WP SMUSH in WordPress can be used to automate image optimization, Hummingbird and W3 total Cache can help optimize CSS and JS minifying, and other web performance chores. In the ongoing quest for efficiency, it’ll be in your interest to get familiar with them.