It’s an ever-evolving field, they say, and the job of a front-ender these days is broad. It’s not just “I write the HTML and CSS” anymore if it ever was. It’s part designer, part coder, part empath, part interaction designer, and part futurist. Let’s talk about all that by actually building a website. We’ll start from scratch, work through the stages of the process, and end up with a finished website. This will give us an excuse to talk about all the big topics in front-end development and what our jobs really are.
How will this happen? Among other things:
- We’ll scaffold out a design in HTML, giving us an opportunity to talk about things like HTML5, semantics, and accessibility in their native contexts.
- We’ll lay out the site in CSS, and in the process talk about things like modern layout techniques (flexbox! grid!), preprocessing, and the role of build tools in the front end process.
- We’ll use some JavaScript to do things that only JavaScript can do, but we’ll do it in a responsible way that performs well and doesn’t cripple the site if it doesn’t load.
- At every turn, we’ll consider performance and user experience, making sure we’re building something for human beings, not spec sheets or portfolios.
- And we’ll think about how to make the offline experience the best it can be because we never know when someone will suddenly lose bandwidth due to network outages, subway tunnels, or holding the phone wrong.
All this in just one day? Yes! By the time we’re done, we’ll have reconsidered not just what we do, but why we do it, and how to do it better moving forward.
