32 Resources for Front End Developers from Onward Search. The success of your front end development career will depend mostly on how dedicated and skilled you are, but you’ll also need a fully stocked arsenal of resources and guides to get and stay ahead in this ever evolving industry. In no particular order, these books, blogs, websites, podcasts and industry leaders will help you learn or refine crucial front end techniques, keep you on top of emerging development trends and help you build the best skill set for your career goals. Books Pick up these publications for everything from beginners guidance to advanced front end techniques and examples. Dive Into HTML5 by Mark Pilgrim - A free reference that’s great for beginners who want to gain a solid understanding of the basics. Developing with Web Standards by John Allsopp – An informative guide for developing today and a look at what the future may hold for front end developers.
Websites and Blogs Bolster your RSS feeds with updates from these valuable industry sites. Podcasts and more People. Steve Souders - High Performance Web Sites. Four Essential Web Design Tips. Designing a website is no easy undertaking. A website is a means of communication first and foremost, but it must also be visually engaging. If a website fails to communicate the ideas contained there then it has failed in its purpose. There are a number of different elements that contribute to a website’s functionality.
Be sure to be careful, in the design field it’s easy to step on toes and get into a patent infringement litigation. So make sure your design ideas are your own! Advertisement 1.) Perhaps the most important element of any web page is the ability to read it. Choose a font that is fairly plain. 2.) Sidebars are useful for keeping a site organized and they have become the norm throughout the Web. Horizontal menu bars are also quite useful. 3.) Nobody likes a slow website. 4.) Make the site sticky. With attention to these elements of web site design, creating an efficient and effective website becomes much easier. Author : Sally Marshall I am a blogger to the core.
Web Development Tips and Tools for Beginners (and Experts) Every great web developer starts with HTML. From there comes an array of tools that every developer can use to create great websites.The basics would be a text editor and an image editing software. But why be content in using those two when there are available tools that can expedite not only your coding speed but also help you organize and learn new things? Expedite Development With the Following: 1. MVC Framework A Model-View-Controller framework is like an architectural plan in software/web development. According to a web developer I interviewed about MVC, there are two ways on how a developer codes.
Now I will elaborate this to the point where even my grandma would understand, because the concept would be very confusing for people who learn of MVC’s existence just now (I was made aware of this gem 8 hours prior writing this). In the second way I mentioned, suppose you have a DropDown for the quantity of shirts to add on your cart and: Every bullet suggests one file each. Code Igniter 2. 9 Confusing Naming Conventions for Beginners.
Especially when first getting started with various web development languages, it can prove to be a difficult task to learn all of the various naming conventions from language to language. This can be even more confusing when developers disagree on what's considered best practice. To help ease the transition for beginners, this list will describe some of the more common conventions. 1. Underscore Before the Property Name When you come across a variable or method that is proceeded by an _, there's no voodoo magic being performed behind the scenes. It's simply a naming convention that reminds the developer that the variable/property/method is either private or protected, and cannot be accessed from outside of the class. PHP Method Note that, in the code above, the underscore is not what makes the variable or method private; the private/protected keyword does that.
JavaScript Method By making Female equal to, not a function, but the returned object, we can create private variables. 2. 3. 4. 5. HOW TO: Organize Web Development Projects Like a Pro. This is a guest post from Jay Melone, founder @ DigitalXBridge, which provides web and mobile design + development, SEO, eMail Marketing and hosting services out of the NYC area. While web designers and developers are touted as being the tech-savvy and brilliantly creative types, they also have the unfortunate rap of being some of the most disorganized individuals on the planet. Luckily, most design shops come equipped with overly attentive, detail-oriented project managers. For those freelance designers working solo, or small web shops still operating in cowboy-code-slinging mode, this post is especially for you.
Take some notes on the process employed below and begin pitching your services as Grade-A Professional. These process tips and tools will help you stay on top of your deliverables, submit dates to your clients you can reasonably hit, track changes requests along the way and, in the end, deliver a quality product. Phase 1: Research & Analysis Phase 2: Design Phase 5: Go-Live. Tips on How to Code Web Designs Better. Writing semantic, efficient and valid HTML and CSS can be a time-intensive process that only gets better with experience. While it is important to take the time to produce high-quality code — as it is what separates professionals from hobbyists — it is equally important to produce websites as expeditiously and efficiently as possible. As web designers, we’re always looking for ways to be more productive. Getting more work done in less time while at the same time maintaining (or improving) our products’ quality is a lifelong quest for many of us.
This article discusses a few fundamental techniques for writing high quality and efficient HTML and CSS. Use Templates and Frameworks (Even If It’s Homemade) Using templates and frameworks provides you with a solid baseline from which to start from. For example, CSS frameworks such as the 960 Grid System and Blueprint can save you time in having to write code for bulletproof web page layouts. Conform to XHTML 1.0 Strict Doctype Compared to: Code Standards | Isobar. Overview This document contains guidelines for web applications built by the Creative Technology (front end engineering) practice of Roundarch Isobar. It is to be readily available to anyone who wishes to check the iterative progress of our best practices. This document's primary motivation is two- fold: 1) code consistency and 2) best practices.
By maintaining consistency in coding styles and conventions, we can ease the burden of legacy code maintenance, and mitigate risk of breakage in the future. By adhering to best practices, we ensure optimized page loading, performance and maintainable code. Pillars of Front-end Development ◊ General Practices ◊ Indentation ◊ For all code languages, we require indentation to be done via soft tabs (using the space character). Readability vs Compression ◊ We prefer readability over file-size savings when it comes to maintaining existing files. The first component of any web page is the tag-based markup language of HTML . Template ◊ Doctype ◊ HTML5 Doctype. 5 Good Habits That Will Make You a Better Coder. We all want to grow in the things we do, and in the field of web development, one of the main areas that we spend a lot of time on is our code. This could include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, ActionScript or any other language that you may choose to use for building websites.
In this article, I’ll share some practical steps that you can take to expand your skill set and become a better coder. I would like to propose five different habits that you can adapt in order to help yourself become more excellent at what you do. 1. Focus on One Type of Language at a Time If you are designing and developing for the web, there are often numerous different languages that you will need to familiarize yourself with, and it can be tempting to try to learn them all at once, especially considering how interconnected they all are.
I suppose that, to some degree, this is inevitable. Do you need to become better at WordPress development? 2. Example 3. 4. 5. CSS3 Transforms & @font-face Experiment. Making Wrong Code Look Wrong. By Joel Spolsky Wednesday, May 11, 2005 Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of aircraft carriers. The first time I walked into the bakery I couldn’t believe what a mess it was. The sides of the ovens were yellowing, machines were rusting, there was grease everywhere. “Is it always this messy?” “What? Oh boy. It took me a couple of months of cleaning the bakery every morning before I realized what they meant.
Clean did not mean the paint on the ovens was nice and white. The whole concept of clean in the bakery was something you had to learn. After two months in the bakery, you learned how to “see” clean. Code is the same way. When you start out as a beginning programmer or you try to read code in a new language it all looks equally inscrutable. For example, in C: char* dest, src; Even more subtle: if (i ! If (i ! 1. 2. 3. 4. An Example Right. Five Ways to Guarantee Your Failure as a Web Professional. This article is geared towards anyone looking to implode under the crushing weight of unsustainable business practices, unreasonable client expectations, long hours for little pay, and a general sense of bewilderment as you ponder what went wrong.
While that may not be you today, you may identify with one or more of these afflictions. Are you already recalling your worst client and the headaches they have caused? Here are some of the ways that you can hurt yourself as a web professional. 1. Be a Jack of all trades It seems the conventional wisdom lies in how much you know rather than how well you know it. Think about it: has a client ever hired you just because you knew 8 programming languages and 10 web development frameworks?
If you can’t settle on a particular tool set, you won’t be able to gain that competitive edge we all desperately need to be successful. 2. Getting work is great, isn’t it? Inevitably, though, what happens as the workload increases? 3. 4. Now back to reality. 5. 10 Tips for Writing Quality Code. James Schorr, the owner of Tech Rescue has a guest post on the Ruby Learning blog where he asks "Do You Enjoy Your Code Quality?
" He makes a strong argument for treating programming as craftsmanship writing that the goal of his article is to help people improve code quality and "transform the mundane into the beautiful. " Schorr offers a number of tips for pre- through post-development of projects, and while some of his points may be geared towards independent consultants and independent developers, they're pretty applicable to anyone: Pre-Development Gather all the requirements from clients up front. Schorr recommends thinking of these in terms of "stories" as "it's more in line with how the non-developer thinks. "Clarify what is necessary and what's just "nice-to-have.
" Development Out-engineer user-error as much as possible. Post-Development How do you achieve quality programming? The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. By Joel Spolsky Wednesday, August 09, 2000 Have you ever heard of SEMA? It's a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don't follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understand that stuff. So I've come up with my own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. Of course, these are not the only factors that determine success or failure: in particular, if you have a great software team working on a product that nobody wants, well, people aren't going to want it. 1. 2.
If the process takes any more than one step, it is prone to errors. 3. Breaking the build is so bad (and so common) that it helps to make daily builds, to insure that no breakage goes unnoticed. 4. Bug databases can be complicated or simple. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Utilizing The Power Of Recycling In Web Design - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Truth be told, I am a philistine. When people talk about recycling, I don’t think of saving the planet. In my earlier post, “Lessons Learned: Productivity Tips For Running A Web Design Business,” I wrote about how we can reuse and recycle what we do in the Web industry to save time and money. Now let’s explore the subject further. We will look at how we can recycle existing work (done by ourselves or others) in order to be more efficient.
By doing so, we can finish projects more quickly and generate a better profit margin. Developers: The Kings Of Recycling I was once told that all good developers are lazy. At the core of this “lazy’” approach to development lies the principle of “coding only once.” Classes and Functions Mid-project, it is easy to focus on the immediate challenge and fail to think long term. Functions that can be used in multiple projects can save developers a lot of time. To recycle, write reusable functions and classes, not project-specific code. (al) (il) 10 things web developers must know to become truly amazing.