Mistakes Front-End Developers Make

Front-end developers are the ones who make sure designs actually get implemented on the web. The job of a Front-end is to understand clients and their behaviour, and accordingly build attractive websites.

Front-end development has changed a lot in all aspects during the last few years. When you are a front-end developer, you should know how to make your design more flexible and most importantly know what to avoid in order to reduce your coding mistakes.

Here are a few common mistakes front-end developers should avoid:

Writing code with old HTML elements
The newest form of HTML coding language is HTML5. It is the fifth and current major version of HTML standards, with a lot of changes to standard web designs. HTML5 replaces many elements and introduces new interesting HTML5 elements such as:
* New semantics elements like <header>, <footer>, <article>, and <section>.
* New attributes of form elements like number, date, time, calendar, and range.
* New graphic elements: <svg> and <canvas>.
* New multimedia elements: <audio> and <video>.

A web design totally depends on browser capability so it is not advisable using outdated HTML standards so that we don’t face any problem in future

Not optimising the images
One should check the image sizes and eventually optimize every image you get from your client. It’s important that you test your website to ensure the images load fast, which will make users happy and they will browse the site for a longer time.

Using inline CSS styles
Using inline CSS is easy but it’s poor practice. We should always create a separate CSS file with .css extension, which should then be linked to the HTML file. An example of why inline CSS is a poor practice: Suppose a client wants a description link colour to be orange and we add inline CSS to all description links as orange. Later the client wants to make all such links blue. In this case, we have to change the colour of each and every description link to blue which is time-consuming. Instead of this, we can give the description link a class and then give that class a colour in the CSS file.

Forgetting about browser compatibility
Basically, Front-end design is dependent on JavaScript, hence any websites that we develop should be compatible across browsers. The site should at least work on the most popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Forgetting about responsive mobile designs
Users should be able to access the site from any device, be it desktop or mobile device. The site should target most of the popular devices in today’s IT world. To get all this working smoothly, the best way is to follow the mobile-first approach.

When I was new to front-end development, I faced some of these above problems. I had to take help from my seniors. After understanding the above-mentioned points, I now know why front-end development is equally important as server-side development (like PHP, .NET). It’s the job of the front-end developers to make the website appealing to the clients.

Reagan Fernandes