Writing a thousand lines of code and turning that into a website is one of the most creative and complicated things for web developers. If you get excited seeing a lot of beautiful websites and thinking to try your hands on them then we need to open your eyes by telling you some important things that you should know as a web developer.
Creating a website that gets a lot of users’ attention is not just about learning various programming languages, you also need to learn some other concepts like DevTools, data formats, testing, APIs, authentication, and a lot of stuff like that once you will dig yourself into this field. We are going to cover some important stuff here that you should learn as a web developer.
1. HTML/CSS/JS
The most important skill or knowledge every developer should learn first is these three basic building blocks i.e. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You will be using HTML and CSS in the front end for interfaces. Just right-click on your web browser and then select the view page source option. You will find the structure of your website where a lot of HTML tags are used for different purposes.
CSS is also used in the front end that decides the style, design, layout and how HTML elements need to be displayed on the screen.
Javascript is high in demand nowadays and it is basically responsible for making your HTML pages dynamic and interactive. Javascript also comes with a variety of languages like PHP, Python, ASP.Net to make your website more interactive. If you’re gonna specialize in javascript like MEAN Stack or MERN stack then you’re gonna deep dive into this language because this one will be your frontend as well as backend language.
2. Git and GitHub
Git is one of the most popular version control systems which is used in most organizations. Chances are higher that you need to work on this version control if you get a job as a web developer. This is the reason you should definitely spend some time learning Git and some basic commands like cloning, pushing to repositories, making a pull request, merging branches, etc.
GitHub is a service where you can push your Git repositories to host your code. It is used for collaboration or we can say it allows developers to work together on projects.
3. Browser DevTools
You can do a lot of stuff using browser DevTools like debugging, editing HTML elements, editing CSS properties, checking devices, tracking javascript errors, etc. Every developer should be aware of using different tabs (elements, console, network, etc.) in DevTools to make their work easier and faster. Depending on your browser you can use any DevTools like Chrome DevTools, Firefox DevTools, or whatever browser you are using. People generally prefer using Chrome DevTools to develop, test, and debug the web application but again it’s the choice of the developer which browser he/she is using to develop the website.
4. API (Application Programming Interface)
In web development, you will be working a lot with APIs which is basically dealing with third-party data. It allows developers to use some of the functionality without sharing the code. There is an awesome GitHub repository of APIs which you can use for different purposes and it also gives you a lot of project ideas. You can check the link Public APIs end to explore it.
We recommend you learn about using Rest APIs, HTTP request methods (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE), building a Rest API, and CRUD operation (Create, Read, Update, Delete). Different status codes, data formats (JSON, HTML, or XML) used in the request, etc.
5. Authentication
There is a huge chance that you will be dealing with user authentication to track the users on a specific website. For example, allowing the users to log in, log out or create some resources from their personal account, which user created which resource, or blocking some pages for those users who are not logged in. Users’ account security heavily depends on authentication. So it’s important to know how to deal with these kinds of functionality in your web application.
There are a lot of ways to implement authentication for users and it depends on what programming language or technology you are using. If you are using React on frontend and Node with Express in the backend then you might use JWT (JSON Web Tokens) for authentication, if you are using Php then you will have to work with session and cookies, you can also use third parties like Google or Twitter for login. So there are multiple ways to work with authentication but it’s an important concept in web development to learn and implement.
6. MVC (Model, View, Controller)
MVC is a design pattern that saves a lot of time for developers to separate the whole application into three different sections. Working on the MVC pattern makes development faster and easier. A lot of the higher-level frameworks like Laravel, Django (based on MVT close to MVC), and Angular based on MVC patterns. In MVC, the Model is all about database interaction, the view is responsible for whatever the user sees on the screen and the controller acts as an interface between the model and the view. Learning MVC will help you to understand frameworks for any programming language easily.
7. Programming Languages (Backend)
Computers don’t understand human languages and that’s the reason you need to talk to your system with the programming languages. In web development, programming languages are compulsory to learn and all the logic you can apply using a wide range of programming languages. Web developers use a variety of languages like PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, and recently Javascript also giving competition introducing itself to handle the backend part. As a web developer, you must have knowledge of at least one programming language to build your web application.
8. Problem-Solving and Searching
If you want to become a web developer you should have some natural problem-solving and searching skills. Problem-solving and searching skills can be built through some projects, through data structures and algorithms, solving some challenges, puzzles, and stuff like that but you need to keep practicing whatever you choose. No matter if you are a beginner or experienced, in web development, you will be searching for the information, syntax, or solution for some problems a lot while building the application. You will definitely encounter some strange errors, you are completely unaware of and there you need to take the help of google or StackOverflow communities to solve the problem.
9. Writing Tests
A lot of developers consider this useless and a waste of time. For the small application, you can ignore writing tests but if you are building a large application we recommend you to write tests like unit tests and other types of tests because it helps in making your whole process robust and debugging become easier. Initially, you will be feeling like you are wasting your time but later you will realize it actually saves you time, so, make a habit of writing tests while building your application.
10. DevOps and Deployment
Last but not the least, as a web developer you should have the knowledge of maintenance, scaling, migrating, and deploying your code on different platforms like cloud, AWS, Heroku, Netlify, etc. A lot of options are there so spend some time learning about these platforms, how these services work and how to deploy or maintain your code on these platforms.
Bonus Point: SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important aspects of creating a website. Without SEO a website is meaningless, hence it is important that before creating any website one should gain all knowledge about SEO in order to increase visibility and readability to web crawlers. If a website does not have proper search engine optimization then it can fail drastically. For instance, if the website you have created does not have a proper link structure then the search engines will not be able to crawl it hence, it will have a low ranking. Therefore, if you do not want this problem to arise do a proper SEO on your website.
Conclusion
If you want to upgrade your skill, then the whole developer community will support you tremendously. However, it takes time to learn all these above-mentioned skills but continuous reading and improvement will take you to heights. Therefore, if you want to become a successful web developer then do learn these hacks as they will definitely help you to grow as a developer.
