Ground Report

38 percent of people will stop interacting with a website, if the layout/content is unattractive – Adobe

A highly functional and user-friendly website is key to business success. While the appeal of the website is important, the functionality is crucial. This is where front-end development comes into play. Web design determines how a website should look and front-end development is the method of implementing the design on the website. Successful front-end development can attract customers and clients, while going wrong with this can cause immense damage.

Moreover, with the increasing concentration on smartphones and mobile devices, websites need to be responsive and offer exceptional user experience across all devices. With help of platforms and technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more, front-end developers can build intuitive websites that help businesses achieve their goals faster.

Having some useful tools at hand can make tasks easier and help developers create brilliant websites. Here are the top six tools to further develop your front end development skills:

1. Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a top-rated text editor for code, markup and prose that features a user-friendly and efficient user interface. Several tools can be categorised as good code editors, but the USPs for Sublime Text include the several keyboard shortcuts and support plugins, snippets, and more.

The main features include command palette (CTRL + SHIFT + P), file switching (CTRL + P), Goto Symbols, Multi-edit (CTRL + CLICK), and others.

Sublime Text offers a Free Trial version; however, you need to pay $70.00 (per user) to purchase the licensed version.

2. jQuery

jQuery is a fast and feature-rich JavaScript library that makes coding easier. Event handling, HTML document traversal and manipulation, animation and Ajax become a lot simpler with jQuery as it offers an easy-to-use API that is compliant with multiple browsers.

jQuery was the most popular JavaScript library in 2015 and is known to have been installed on 65 percent of the top 10 million websites with the highest traffic.

jQuery is an open-source software available free of cost.

3. GitHub

GitHub is one of the largest code hosts with over 50 million repositories. It has a strong community of more than 10 million people; and developers can discover, use, and contribute to more than 26 million projects.

GitHub allows you to view the changes that are being made to a project and even enables you to go back to the original state. The major features include field tested tools, integrated issue tracking, collaborative code review, easy team management within organizations, among others.

Free and paid versions are available. The Personal paid version starts at $7 per month, while the Enterprise version starts at $21 per user per month.

4. AngularJS

Angular is one the most popular front-end frameworks available. HTML is known to be the foundation of any front-end development project. Angular defines itself as ‘a toolkit for enhancing HTML.’ With help of ‘directives,’ you can turn a static HTML document into a dynamic template.

Angular offers Angularjs Scope, Angularjs Directives, Angularjs Templates, Angularjs Filters, Angularjs Routing, Angularjs Testing, Angularjs Data Binding, and more.

AngularJS is an open-source software available free of cost.

5. Chrome Developer Tools

Chrome offers a wide range of developer tools that have been improved over the years. Every release brings along brand new development tool features that make tasks easier for front end developers. The Chrome developer tools allow developers to edit DOM (HTML)/CSS in real-time, debug JavaScript, add a terminal, among other things.

Some of the most important features of chrome developer tools include ‘Force Element State,’ ‘DOM Breakpoints,’ ‘Console API,’ ‘Audits Panel,’ and more.

Chrome Developers Tools is free to use. Simply open a webpage/app in Google Chrome in order to access the DevTools. Select Tools > Developer Tools from Chrome menu.

6. ImageOptim

It cannot be denied that visual content is a must for making a website attractive and appealing. But, too many images can make the website slower. 40 percent people abandon a website that take more than three seconds to load. It is, therefore, necessary to reduce image file sizes (without losing their quality) so that they occupy less disk space and bandwidth and ensure the ideal loading speed of the website.

ImageOptim is a simple image-compression tool that crushes PNG, GIF, and JPEG images in a lossless manner for Web usage.

ImageOptim is free for use as it is an open-source software.

Conclusion

If you are looking for ways to accomplish your projects within preset deadlines, making use of the available front-end development tools is a must. While a plethora of front-end developer tools are available, the ones mentioned above can make your tasks easier and quicker. Successful front-end development initiatives can not only take the business further, but can also help you evolve as a top-class developer.