Front-end web developers are important individuals in the realm of website design and development. Front-end developers take care of the visual elements of a website or a web-based application. They are usually supported by back-end developers who take care of the server-side application integration as well as logic associated with the work that front-end developers accomplish.
Associated with the best website development company in Delhi and other cities across the country, front-end developers are considered to be the technical lifeline of any organization offering services in the realm of the web. Before going deeper into what front–end developers do and what their roles and responsibilities are; let’s take a look at what the front end actually is:
What is the front end?
All websites including an e-commerce platform, an independent blog, any news portal or any organizational website are designed and developed intending to provide users with an aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly experience. Front-end and back-end are the two major aspects when it comes to designing and developing either a website or a web-based application.
As the name suggests and implies, front-end development is related to the front end of a website or even a web application. This is what a website user sees first of all and interacts with by way of clicking and scrolling. In a nutshell, front-end is completely a client-side functionality associated with a website designed and developed by the best website development company. On the contrary, the back end refers to the events that take place entirely behind the scenes. These include database, infrastructure, communication, and connection.
Defining the Role of a Front-End Developer
A front-end developer, also referred to as a client-side developer, is responsible for producing the code which a web server sends to a client/front-end intending to establish a user interface. For instance, when you start browsing a website by loading a webpage into the browser of your choice, the concerned web server sends a code to the device/client requesting that particular page. The code sent during the event produces the user interface that you see in the web browser. This code is the very front-end code blending different contemporary web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Front-end developers are responsible for developing the web platform which is most commonly associated with the run times of the browser. To understand the front-end developers’ role with more clarity in a practical way, you just need to do the following:
Open any web browser like Opera, Mozilla Firefox, or even Google Chrome, and navigate to a page like Google.com, and whatever you see as a result, is done by none other than a front-end developer making use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
As for web platform runtime, it is not just for web browsers but can also be used by Progressive Web App (aka PWA) techniques and WebViews to create native-like web-based apps installed on an operating system. What it simply means is that a front-end developer can make the most of his/her technological knowledge as well as the web platform runtime concerning the browsers and web development to create effective and efficient native applications for different operating systems that majorly include Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and Linux.
Front-end developers also deal with a large number of non-trivial areas of complexity including the following:
- Font rendering
- Search engine optimizations
- Accessibility standards
- Web security (e.g., SSL, OAuth2, XSS)
- Image optimizations
- Network performance
- HTML email
- Browser performance
- JavaScript performance
- HTML, CSS, and DOM rendering, and
- Divergent JavaScript runtimes.
Skill set a professional front-end developer possesses
A professional front-end developer, apart from having a perfect working knowledge of different browsers, possesses skills in the given below web technologies:
- JavaScript Object Notation (aka JSON)
- Document Object Model (aka DOM)
- Uniform Resource Locators (aka URLs)
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (aka HTTP)
- HyperText Markup Language (aka HTML)
- Cascading Style Sheets (aka CSS)
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (aka WCAG) & Accessible Rich Internet Applications (aka ARIA)
- JavaScript Programming Language (aka ECMAScript 262)
- Web APIs (aka Browser APIs).
Here is a quick summary of the roles and responsibilities of a front-end developer:
Front-end developers play a pivotal role in determining whether a website or a web-based application will provide an intuitive or a horrendous digital experience to the users. Building the customer-facing side of apps and websites, front-end developers make them easy to navigate and function.
Some of the top job roles include the following:
- Development/Maintenance of different websites and web-based apps, perfectly optimized for varied browsers and devices
- Accomplishing cross-browser compatibility for all screen sizes
- Incorporating different interactive as well as user-friendly features in a website including forms, buttons and menus
- Making use of JavaScript frameworks and libraries such as React or Angular to develop intriguing interactive features for a website or a web-app
- Writing a clean, efficient, and easy to understand code
- Conducting comprehensive testing on applications to ensure they are bug-free and working efficiently.
Concluding Remarks
Front-end developer training as well as education even today is a complicated endeavour. Those who enter this field make it through pure determination and self-directed learning resources. Front-end developers are expected to have proven skills not only in UI design and Interaction Design but also in some other practically crucial areas such as computer science, computer programming, and software engineering. Front-end developers also need to be all-time ready for riding the wave of changing technologies, specifications, frameworks, and tools. For some other insightful and enlightening blogs on professional web development, keep following this space.