What Is Front-End Development?

The internet is something we spend hours with, even though we like to think that we don’t. Our phones don’t lie, particularly the part which counts how many times you opened your screen, how many times you visited a site, or opened an application. You can’t really run away from statistics, unless you close the app and look elsewhere.

One of the reasons why the internet is so captivating are websites, even though people also use applications.

Websites have to look good in order to be something desirable by us consumers. They also need to be optimized and interactive. This is where front-end developers jump in and help make things better.

Here is everything you should know about front-end development.

Front-end Development – The User Side of Things

Given that there are two sides to developing a site, the front and the back-end. The front-end focuses on everything you see and interact with, the visual elements, the clickable elements, the changing elements.

Front-end developers focus on all the things that the user will be interacting with when they open the site. All the images you see, all the text, all the things you can click, the things that move, the front-end developer is responsible for these things being in their place and working the way they should be.

This is a job that requires constant adaptation and updates, given that things may break with the slightest plugin change. No one wants to see a page which has text and warnings, instead of regular content.

Skills a Front-end Developer Needs

Front-end development is not easy but front-end developers need some skills or rather, programming languages if they want to do their jobs right. The first things on the list are the most basic ones, HTML, CSS and of course, JavaScript.

HTML and CSS generate most of the content that you see on a web page. Without these two, being a front-end developer is impossible, unless you are dreaming of being one. JS is responsible for all the content that you can interact with.

Know that JS is very powerful and you could make video games in it and not just clickable objects. Discord is written in JS.

Typical Front-end Developer Goals

Everyone should have a very clear goal when they are developing something, including a website. For front-end developers, three things come to mind, accessibility, performance and speeding up the development process.

The first part is very easy, the site should be accessible from all devices and there shouldn’t be an obstacle for almost any browser. The site should adhere to modern standards, mobile and desktop.

Performance means that the site should load fast and be ready to work in any circumstance. Performance also means that all should work smoothly, from clickable elements to images.

The last one is straightforward in the sense that you want to speed up the development process, so as not to waste time.

This is what front-end development is and if you see a misbehaving site and its visuals are all over the place, you know who to complain to.