How to become a good Front-End Developer in 2022 - A Complete Roadmap
So you want to make one of those cool-looking websites? Don't worry I gotcha! If you are just a beginner who wants to get into the world of development this article will help you with all the basic technologies that you need to know and learn to create awesome websites yourselves!
What is Front-End development?
In layman's terms, when you open up a website, whatever you see on the webpage is the front end of that website. This is one of the most important parts of a website. When a user visits your website, whether he is going to continue or not largely depends upon the appearance of the website.Looks matter!
A frontend developer is a person who is responsible for the development of the design, layout, and user interface of the website. The various roles of a front end developer include:
- Coming up with innovative web designs for maximum user retention and ensuring a good user experience
- Designing & coding the visual elements of the website
- Make sure the website renders properly on all devices i.e creating responsive designs
- Staying up-to-date with the latest web design trends
Now that we have covered the what, let's focus on the how:
How do I become a Front-end developer?
Below I have listed the technologies (in order of how I learned them) that are a must-learn in 2022 to become an efficient front-end developer. Do not try to learn 100% of all these technologies at once Simply learning the key topics mentioned should be enough to get you started and then learn as you go.
1. Learn HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. If we compare a website to a human body, you can say that HTML is the skeleton. HTML provides the basic structure of the website.
Key-topics to learn:
- Basic tags: heading, paragraph, div, span, anchor, image, etc
- Advanced tags: ul, ol, table, form, select
- Differences between inline elements and block elements and their use-cases
- Concept of classes and ids
- Using semantic tags (very important for SEO)
- Industry-standard conventions and best practices
Project Idea: Build a simple website using only HTML which will display your biodata with your image and links to all your social media accounts.
2. Learn CSS
If you are going to become a frontend developer, this is the part where you should put the most effort.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. When compared to the human body, you can say that CSS is the muscles and skin. CSS defines how the website looks.
Key-topics to learn:
- Differences between Inline, Internal & External CSS
- CSS Selectors and pseudo-selectors
- Basic attributes such as fonts, colors, borders, backgrounds
- Differences between margin and padding as well as the concept of Box Model
- Display property & Position property & Transform property - how and where to use
- Relations and uses between various units - px, em, rem, vh, vw, etc
- CSS Grid & CSS Flexbox (very important!)
- Simple CSS animations and keyframes
- Responsive Design using media queries (again, very important!)
Project Idea: Add styles to the webpage that you created earlier to look like a proper portfolio website. Additionally, you can try to recreate the design of some of your favorite websites!
3. Choose a CSS framework
CSS frameworks are libraries that contain pre-coded classes that you can add to your HTML elements and style them in a particular way without writing actual CSS yourself. They make styling websites easier & faster and are already responsive.
Even if you want to write your own custom CSS, it is important to understand and learn how to use these frameworks since a lot of websites use them.
Among the various options available, the two most popular ones are - Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS. Both have their own pros and cons but at the end of the day, they work the same, and it's completely up to one's personal preference. You can go through the documentation of both and select one which suits you the best.
Project Idea: Create a copy of only the HTML of your portfolio and style it only using Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS.
4. Learn Javascript
Javascript is a very popular programming language. It can be compared with the various systems of the human body such as the nervous system or the digestive system. It adds functionality to a website. You can structure (let's say) a button using HTML, give it a style using CSS, but what actually happens when the user clicks on the button is programmed using Javascript.
I personally believe that learning Javascript can change your life. It is the best programming language to learn for development since it can be used both on the frontend as well as the backend of a website. So you can create an entire website by learning only a single language!
Key-topics to learn:
- Variables, Data Types, Operators
- Strings, Arrays, and their built-in functions
- Scope, conditional statements, if-else, switch case, and program flow.
- Looping control - for, while, for-each, etc
- Javascript Objects
- Functions
- DOM Manipulation using Javascript
- Events & handling events in Javascript
Advanced Topics (required for a later section):
- Asynchronous Programming
- ES6 features
- Arrow functions & Callback functions
- Promises
- Async / Await
- Fetch API function
- Error handling using try-catch-finally
- Destructuring
Project Idea: At this point, you can make a lot of things. Some beginner ideas include - Calculator, Weather App, Image slider, Quiz App, To-do list, Timer App, etc
5. Learn Git & GitHub
Since you have basically completed the basics of frontend development, now should be the best time to learn about Git and GitHub. Git is a version control system. It allows us to save our code -well, at various points in time. So, if you break your code, you can literally go back in time and get your code back! GitHub is an online repo hosting service. Think of Git and GitHub as email and Gmail. I think you get it now.
Key-topics to learn:
- Basic CLI commands
- Initializing a local repository
- Adding and committing changes to the repo
- Branching and Merging
- Creating an online repo on GitHub
- Linking the online & local repo
- Pushing code to the online repo
Project Idea: Push all your projects to your GitHub account and maintain them.
6. Learn a Package Manager
A large number of projects are bound to use certain packages, modules, or plugins in their codebase.
Package Managers provide an easy way of installing packages and modules for your projects as well as updating, configuring, and removing them as required.
Two main options are - NPM and Yarn. I personally prefer NPM but you can learn Yarn as well or even both!
Key-topics to learn:
- Searching packages online and installing them locally using command line
- Updating existing packages
- Removing existing packages
- Creating local modules & importing/exporting them
7. Learn a front-end Framework
Learning a front-end framework is an absolute must in 2022. These frameworks make it easier to write and manage large-scale code and have a large number of advantages over just plain HTML-CSS-JS.
There are various popular ones out there such as - React, Angular, Vue, etc. I recommend learning ReactJS. But before starting to learn these frameworks, make sure you have a solid grasp of javascript topics as mentioned earlier.
Since React itself is a huge topic, I won't be mentioning the key topics here. Instead, I'll be making a separate article about it. But you can find step-by-step React tutorials anywhere online! Some key-topics:
- JSX
- React Virtual DOM
- Components & Props
- State
- React hooks
Project Idea: Build your existing projects using React.
8. Learn Figma and UI/UX
I think it is absolutely essential for a frontend developer to know UI/UX concepts to ensure that users have a good experience on the website and they keep coming back.
Figma is a free-to-use UI designing platform. You can create the entire UI of your website before you write any line of code using Figma. Creating the design of the website before actually starting to write code saves a lot of time, effort, and confusion. Having the design in front of you actually makes the coding process a lot faster since you actually know what your next line should be.
Key-topics to learn:
- Latest UI/UX design trends
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- Exporting Figma elements
- Converting Figma designs to actual code
Project Idea: Design the UI of your next project and ask your friends for suggestions before beginning actual coding.
That's it! I think you can call yourself a FrontEnd Developer now. Next steps: Keep building projects, create an amazing portfolio and apply for frontend positions! Good Luck!
