Skills Required to Become a Front End Web Developer

Today, no business can exist without having its own website to interact with its customer base. Having a website is no more restricted to the big MNCs. With the advancement in technology and global business, even the small enterprises are spending on having their own websites and development teams. The person works on web development is called a Web Developer.

source: http://designrfix.com/

Let us first of all have an understanding of what Front End and Back End are.

Front End and Back End?

The Front End of any website is the visual interface which the user interacts with. This comprises of the design, colours, content, images, animations and buttons. In simple words, the Front End is everything which is visible to the website user.

The Back End of a website is not visible to the user. Back End supports the Front End for interacting with the user. It includes the code which makes the front-end work and the database where the data is stored.

A Simple Use Case: Assume a website to be a car. There is an entire engineering inside a car which makes it speed up, turn left-right, slow down etc. We can’t see it. This is the Back End.

But there are some functional components we could see and use directly, like the brake pedals for slowing down and steering to turn the car. All of this is the Front End.

Role and Tasks of a Front End Developer

The job of a Front End Developer is to shape the user’s experience on the website. They decide how the data coming from the back end is displayed to the user. This includes creating a webpage layout, doing styling, using animation and optimizing the navigation in the website.

Here are some specific tasks of a Front End Developer:

• Creating, customizing and maintaining the website’s design and User Interface.
• Creating and editing templates for a web development framework.
• Working on the styling and providing animations to the web pages.
• Working with web designers to turn their static pages into working web pages.
• Working with back end developers to implement their code to develop interactive and dynamic web pages.
• Editing and controlling the content which is being displayed at the website.
• Staying updated with the emerging technologies and trends.

Skills Required 

There’s no specific qualification eligibility to become a Web Developer. However, a degree or diploma in computer applications (like BCA, B.Tech, B.Sc) is usually preferred by any company.

The basic skills needed for this role are knowledge of a markup language, web browsers, styling and scripting language. Here are some specific basic skills:

1. Knowledge of one Markup Language: HTML – This includes knowledge of HTML syntax and tags (including HTML 5).

2. Knowledge of a Styling Language: CSS – This includes basic knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets(including CSS 2 and CSS 3).

3. Knowledge of a Client Side Scripting Language, primarily JavaScript (and jQuery) – This includes good skills on working with Javascript and the jQuery library.

Additional Skills:

• Knowledge of cross browser testing and debugging.
• Knowledge of performance optimization using tools such as PageSpeed.
• Knowledge of Photoshop and a CMS like WordPress.
• Knowledge of object oriented programming (OOP) and PHP.
• Knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
• Knowledge of animation tools like Flash and Dreamviewer.

Future Scope and Job Prospects

The number of people using internet has tripled during last 5 years. Therefore the internet is here to stay.  The growth of globalization has resulted in a great need of services like outsourcing, 24 hour customer support and e-commerce. These services have crossed the barriers of time and geographical location.

Thus the scope of web development is significantly wide. No business can survive without the internet. Therefore the role of a Front end Web Developer is very vital to any enterprise. They have a great demand in MNCs, advertising agencies, publishing media, design studios, manufacturers, educational institutes and any enterprise which has a website. Some of the job roles related to front end web developer are:

• Front End Web Developer
• Front End Web Programmer
• Front End Web Designer
• Front End Webmaster