You will find many testimonials online of people claiming to
land their first job using HTML and CSS only or just having some basic knowledge
of Vanilla JavaScript (plain JavaScript, without any framework or library
knowledge). Well, that would have been very possible a few years ago, but
with all the new frameworks and libraries available, I don’t think it would be that easy to land that first job with only the basic web development concepts.
I mean, some people are still hiring developers with the basic concepts, but the
jobs available are very limited, and here is why;
With the Web development basics mentioned above, one can only build simple static websites or just basic landing page designs.
But Content Management Systems (CMS), such as WordPress, can get the job done within
minutes by using drag-and-drop features implemented within their web
development systems. Anybody, even without coding skills today, can create a beautiful and professional static website in minutes.
Another reason is that hundreds of libraries and other online resources have already been developed for
building some popular web components that are available for free online to be used
by anyone. To use these resources, you must copy the code from these online platforms and paste it into your projects. You can find code
snippets for building items such as sliders, cards, landing pages, and CSS and
JavaScript animations readily available to be used in your projects. These
resources have made it possible for people with very limited coding skills to
build websites independently without needing to hire any web developer to
build projects for them.
Also, libraries such as Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS have made
it easy to design using CSS. Instead of learning everything there is to
know about CSS, with Bootstrap, all you need is to master some classes. After including these classes in HTML, elements such as paragraphs, containers, and divs can
now be styled according to your preferences.
So instead of learning basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, learning some of these libraries is also advisable. For CSS, you can learn
Bootstrap, the CSS framework at the moment, but you can also try
Tailwind CSS to get that extra advantage over other CSS developers. There are
several JavaScript libraries and frameworks to learn if you want to become a successful
front-end web developer. The most common and fundamental JS framework
to master at the moment is React JavaScript. There are several others that you
can also try. They include Vue Js, React Native, and Three JS, just to mention a
few.
So that is my opinion from my own experiences as a frontend web
developer on what you need to know in order to stand as a frontend web
developer and also if you want to have a successful career as a web developer.