What skills do I need for front-end web development?

HTM? CSS? Photoshop? What else?

I haven’t been active in 15 years, the industry seems to have changed a lot…

Sitepoint has so many lessons on so many different authoring tools it’s a little bit overwhelming.

HTML and CSS are must have skills, the very basis of front end.
Photoshop I think is less important now, but still has its uses.

One of the big things that may have changed over that time is RWD which is mostly about CSS and how you use it.
The other big front end thing is Javascript, which is useful to know but not always necessary.

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I have the entire Adobe Creative Suite. I pay them monthly subscription. What should I focus on?

Also, what’s RWD?

Responsive Web Design.

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First off, you should probably get up to speed with HTML and CSS, which have moved on in the last 15 years - CSS especially so. As @SamA74 said, responsive design is really important.

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And don’t forget accessibility, usability and performance…

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html5, CSS3 and Javascript are the barebones requirements, that will put you in the bracket with every other frontend developer on the planet, with just those 3 essentials you will be “professionally crippled” into what work you can apply for and will need to exponentially extend your skillset with:

Responsive design practices: Bootstrap/Foundation (or similar grid system),
Templating (Twig or similar, not essential but if you are looking at being a pro frontend dev then its the way to go, your users need simplicity and functionality),
Usage of Javascript libraries (too many to mention),
Sass/Less (css preprocessors, not essential but familiarity will help especially if you use Bootstrap or Foundation).

These are just a start and to be honest are not hard to learn and there is a ton of stuff out there to help you with that learning. We then need to get you looking at Wordpress which has a massive market of employers out there looking for folks to do frontend work on, think of it as a bread and butter platform, this then brings you into the realm of needing to know a little php serverside scripting, thankfully witha system like WP its quite easy, the code is already built you just need to drop into the right places inside your templates.

Photoshop is not really essential, your artistic skills however are (im real poor at frontend because i dont have a designers eye, im far more comfortable doing the backend stuff) any photo editing software which allows you to use rules and slice up your images pixel perfect will suffice.

A decent text editor such as sublime text is a life saver, install into that the “Emmet” package, take a couple of hours to learn the emmet shortcode syntax and you can seriously code up a complex html page in a matter of 5 minutes, its so fast you wont be abke to stop giggling.

It all sounds a bit overwhelming at first but if you take one step at a time with just the things i mentioned you can be up and running and competent in just a couple of months.

However you will never be satisfied as you will find out there is always one more thing to learn, learn them, they add to your skillset.

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If you know the basics of HTML CSS and javascript then you will have no problem learning it. tutorials are available everywhere.So, Don’t worry.

It depends on what you want to do front end website developer then learn HTML CSS photoshop, PHP ASP etc I thank it enough

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