Speaking of important jobs, how about front-end web developers? An organization’s website is the face of the company. It’s the first thing that clients, customers, and prospective job candidates learn about it. A well-crafted, professional looking website improves your credibility and earns the trust of potential stakeholders, often earning the company new business. So what skills do you need to have to secure a position as a front-end developer? Here are five must-have skills for front-end developers in 2019.
HTML & CSS
Pretty traditional mainframes, but HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are skills that every front-end developer should have. Without them, you can’t create a website or improve the formatting. Web designers generally provide the basic formatting, but front-end developers have to know how to modify it and have it accommodate their requirements. Fortunately, they’re pretty easy to learn so if you need add these skills to your resume, it should only take you a few weeks.
JavaScript
Determining the function of a webpage, JavaScript is a programming language. If you need to add audio and video, games, scrolling capabilities, or animations, you’ll need to know JavaScript. Not to mention it’s the most popular programming language in the world, so it’s a pretty valuable skill to learn just to be able to keep up with the competition.
jQuery
jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library that contains a collection of plugins and extensions, like shortcuts to make JS developing faster and easier. It helps you add ready-made elements to webpages that you can customize as you need to. You can use it to automatically rearrange and resize grid layouts, autocomplete in searches, and add countdown timers. If nothing else, using jQuery will boost efficiency, limit human input error, thus improving overall productivity.
JavaScript Framework
And since everyone wants to be more efficient, a solid knowledge of JavaScript Framework is pretty useful. It saves you some time by providing common functionality, like a code file with JS already in it, instead of starting with an empty text document. It’s perfect for websites with complex user interfaces. Since JS is the most popular programming language in the world, knowing its framework is crucial to be a competitive and efficient web developer.
Debugging & Testing
There are a few other frameworks and preprocessors that provide some valuable shortcuts, but before that debugging and testing is a pretty critical skill when it comes to developing a site. You need to know the drawbacks and limitations of your coding structures, so know various techniques like unit testing, UI testing, and more. Once you’ve uncovered those errors, you have to remove them—figure out why and how they’re happening and fix the problem. Once you’re familiar with one of these processes, it’s pretty easy to adapt to others.
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