By the Numbers: 6 Essential Skills to Know Before Starting in Web
In no particular order, here are the baseline skills you should have a firm grasp on before you’ll have a good chance of landing a (corporate) job in web development.
1. Understanding the box model (Proper HTML, CSS)
http://alistapart.com/article/css-positioning-101
http://alistapart.com/article/css-floats-101
Just Kidding! I lied. This is the most important skill. Riding high on learning basic HTML and CSS, often times inexperienced developers start out feeling invincible as they begin coding layouts for websites. Fixed widths, poor positioning, and depending on the positions of certain elements to control your layout will lead to websites that look and behave more like jenga towers than actual websites.
The wireframe test: If you can’t build a website layout from a sketch or wireframe, you’re not ready to get a job in this field.
2. Semantic HTML
This is important for a number of reasons:
- Semantic HTML will save your coworkers time because they will understand the structure of your code
- Semantic HTML will display/behave in a predictable way to a web browser
- Knowing Semantic HTML will make you sound smarter when you are interviewing.
3. Sensible CSS
If you want to make many friends on your development team, become a God at CSS. Many developers of traditional programming languages give up instead of trying to take the time to learn proper CSS because of all the quirks, hacks, and workarounds that have been discovered over the years.
Part of this comes back to the Box Model, but don’t fall into the trap of applying a dozen CSS rules to a problem and seeing what sticks. You’ll create more problems than you solve.
And always, always be learning more. This is an area that it is very difficult to know everything, and sometimes there are multiple solutions to a CSS problem (each having their own pro’s and con’s).
4. Understand Javascript (at least the basics)
You can only get so far with just CSS and HTML. You can only get so far with copying/pasting example scripts/widgets from Google.
Sooner or later, you’re going to have to learn Javascript, and the better you get with it, the more you’ll like it.
Fortunately, there are lots of great resources out there to learn the basics. At the very least, here are some things you should know:
- How to add a widget to a page (adding a facebook share button, or a modal, or a datepicker are great places to start).
- How to change elements on a page (show/hide parts of the page, change colors/size, add items to a list) or do something when a user interacts with the page (on click, on keypress, etc.)
- How to talk to a server (using AJAX) and do something with the information you get back
- How to troubleshoot an error when part of your site breaks (I prefer Chrome’s developer tools)
This is an area where the more you learn, the more you can get paid. Look at this comparison of salaries between designers and developers:
5. Know the limitations: what websites can’t do
Sure, we can all laugh at naive clients that ask for things like printable gifs or editable jpegs, but all to often developers can paint themselves into a corner by optimistically promising a feature or design that is not possible. Save yourself trouble by considering the following:
- Someone is going to type in the maximum length for a user name.
- Someone is going to add twice as much text to a container, or remove all of it entirely.
- You’re going to finish a website, and someone’s going to ask if works on mobile.
6. Keep Learning!
After all these things, you should have a pretty firm grasp on what you need to get started with a career in web. There is more to learn when it comes to searching for jobs, interviewing, and advancing in your career, but this is just the first step!
I have meet developers that get this far and coast along with basic knowledge for 10 years — but then, their jobs were in jeopardy once their company switched to building responsive, mobile-friendly websites. If you want to earn more, do more, and have more fun with web development, you have to keep learning! In my free time, I genuinely enjoy taking time to learn the ins and outs of this industry, and will probably never stop learning about it until the day I die. How far you go in your career is entirely up to you, and I wish you the best of luck.
Happy Coding!