What is a Frontend Developer?

Source: Front End Developer: Learn the 13 Skills You Need in 2022 - Skillcrush

Backlink: Frontend Development See Also: Frontend Development Tools and Skills

Front end web developers are software engineers who implement web designs through coding languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is the person on your team who writes the code for a website’s navigation and layouts — a site looks different on your phone because a front end developer made it so (thanks to mobile-first or responsive design).

Often, a front end web developer makes sure that there are no errors or bugs on the website as well as makes sure that the design appears as it’s supposed to across different platforms and browsers. All of these tasks are important for a good user experience.

The code front end developers write runs inside the user’s web browser (aka client-side) while a back end developer’s code runs server-side, using open source environments (like Node.js) or programming languages (like Python).

For example, if web development is like a car, the front end would be the car body, paint, and interior color (aka all of the visual aspects of the car) whereas the back end is the engine and the gearbox. The user interacts directly with the front end (you can touch it and swap things out and change them without it changing the engine itself) while the back end makes everything run in the background. Now you know something about web development and cars — thank us later!

Full stack developers are comfortable programming with both front end and back end languages.

What do Frontend Developers do?

Bring Design to Life and Maintain UI

Front end developers take web designers’ designs and bring them to life on the screen. They look at a web designer’s wireframes and designs (often called design comps) and then use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make functional and beautiful websites that users can actually interact with.

This means building out the navigation, layouts, and buttons that a web designer has carefully laid out and making sure that all of the design elements work properly while looking the way that they’re supposed to according to the designer’s UX/UI research.

Not only that, but front end developers also make sure the website runs properly. Companies want users to have great experiences on their sites, which means that they need front end developers to make sure that the user interface is always working properly by fixing any bugs or errors that users may encounter.

For example, when you’re on Reddit and when you go to upvote a comment, nothing happens, that might mean there’s a bug with the upvote button, which a front end developer would try to fix.

Implement Mobile Friendly and Responsive Designs

Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design.

Before responsive web design, people used to always build out separate pages for mobile devices.The same website would appear as a single column optimized for touch interaction, but using the same base files on mobile. Responsive web design changed that experience. Instead of using the same files, developers now create different designs for mobile.

Mobile design can include responsive design, but can also mean creating separate mobile-specific designs. Sometimes the experience you want a user to have when visiting your site on a desktop computer is entirely different from what you want them to see when visiting from their smartphone.

In those cases, it makes sense for the mobile site to be completely different. A bank website with online banking would benefit from a separate mobile site that lets users view things like the closest bank location and a simplified account view (since mobile screens are smaller).

Fix Bugs and Errors on Site

As a front end developer, being familiar with testing and debugging processes is vital.

Unit testing is when you evaluate individual blocks of source code (aka, the instructions that tell a website how it should work). Each programming language has a different method and structure for testing these blocks of code.

Debugging is simply taking all of the “bugs” (errors) those tests uncover (or your users uncover once your site is launched), putting on your detective hat to figure out why and how they’re happening, and fixing the problem. Think of it as being a human Raid.

Different companies use slightly different processes for this, but if you’ve used one, you can adapt to others pretty easily.

Because testing and bugging contribute in large part to a positive user experience, they’re critical skills for a front end developer to know.

Solve Problems

Development is all about creative problem solving and getting your program to work — from figuring out how to best implement a design, to fixing bugs that crop up, to seamlessly connecting your front end code work with another software engineer’s back end code.

For example: you’ve created a perfectly-functioning website front end and you hand it over to the back end developers to integrate it with a content management system (CMS). All of a sudden, half your awesome features stop working – what would you do? No really, what would you do?!

A good front end developer will view this as a puzzle to be solved rather than an absolute disaster. Of course, an excellent, senior-level front end developer will anticipate these problems and try to prevent them in the first place!

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