5 Essential Skills For a Front-end Development Career

Any website is a combination of three things front-end, back-end, and database. The front end is the part of the website which the user sees on screen, right now you are seeing this page and reading this article, this is the front end of this website. In the early days of web development, only a single developer does all things, but today the technology got so advance that one person can't do all these things. 

So for big projects, companies are hiring a different person for each work. So, in each project, you will see a separate team for front-end and back-end work.

If you are dreaming to become a front-end developer and want to know about the skills that you should know to pursue this career then you come to the right place.

In this article, we are going to discuss the essential skills that every front-end developer must know. These are the skills that are essential and without these, you can't think about a career in front-end development.

If you are an experienced front-end developer then this article is not for you. This article is for the aspirants only so that they can know where to start. You can continue if you want or you can read other articles on Next Generation careers for career success.

HTML - HyperText Markup language is the full form and 5 is the latest version of this. It is the base for any web application. It is the language that makes the website and browsers understand only this. It means, there is no web application without HTML.

This is the first skill that you need to learn because the other skills that we are going to discuss all depend on it. CSS and Javascript all works with HTML. If you want to learn them then you need to learn HTML first. There are many websites where you can learn this absolutely free. I have mentioned all the websites at the end of this article.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheet is the full form and 3 is the latest version of it. After HTML, this is the 2nd skill that every front-end developer must learn because without this all websites would be looks like plain text nothing attractive.

As the name suggests "Style Sheet", gives the style to each web page. The color of text, size, font, background color, etc. all are defined by CSS. There are CSS frameworks also available nowadays like Bootstrap.

A CSS framework is a collection of predefined CSS styles and you just need to add the library in your HTML file and use that style. You don't have to write your own code.

Now you might think, if such CSS frameworks are available, then why we should learn CSS? CSS frameworks provide you build in styles, but it's not necessary, you'll get everything that you need. Sometimes you have to write your own styles or sometimes you need to overwrite the framework's style. So it's always better you learn the CSS.

JavaScript is also mandatory to learn for every front-end developer along with HTML and CSS. Javascript provides interactivity to your web page like

A responsive web page means the web page you create should display properly on each screen like a laptop, tablet, and mobile, etc. Today you can't build a website that looks good on the big screen only because most of the users today using mobile and browse everything on mobile only.

It's not possible for everyone to have a mobile app or each website is not suitable for a mobile app. So, you need to take care of the responsiveness of the web page.

React and Angular are the most sought-after skills today. You don't need to learn both but must learn one of them to become a front-end developer. Both are based on JavaScript, so if you learn JS first, then it would be easy for you to learn both.

One must follow the same order as mentioned above. HTML, CSS, JS and then react/angular. You can't learn JS or CSS without learning HTML and without JS can't learn React/Angular.

The following skills are not required to become a front-end developer, but these are useful to learn because most of the companies using this to manage their work, if learn them in advance then it would be an upper hand for you over others.

Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system that is used by most companies to manage and share their code with a different version. It is a repository tool where the project code stored and all the team member access it from there and then save back once complete their work.

Bit bucket is another tool for the same purpose. You can learn any one of them.

In simple words, we can say that Jira is a task management software. You can plan, prioritize and track the teamwork. The managers use it to plan the project, create the task and assign it to the team member. Then they track the progress of tasks and the team member update their task progress on it.

Now, you might ask, where I can learn all these skills? So, as a beginner, you should start with the basics of each skill and then go to the advanced level. 

Following are some tutorial websites that offer free basic level tutorials:

But most of them also offer a free trial period too. It can be 7 days to 1 month. So, you can try all of them for free for a while and then choose which seems good to you.

In the end, I would say again, first get handy in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Because these three skills are the base of front-end development. After that, you can choose the advanced skills as per your interest.

HTML, CSS, and JS are also must to learn for those who want to build a career in mobile app development. We will cover the mobile app development skills in the next post.