Frontend Development Guide: Navigating the Digital Facade

Table of Content

• What is Front End Development?
• Difference Between Front End Development & Back End Development
• Top Frontend Programming Languages for Better UI
• Scalable Front End Development Frameworks
• Front End Development Best Practices
• FAQs About Front End Best Practices
• Looking for Front Development Services that can Help You Grow?

Have you ever visited your website? Not as a service provider but as a user. You better do and note what individuality it offers in the user interface, the load time, and the overall website’s user experience.

Once you finish this, visit your competitor’s website and carry the same practices. Got a difference between table and the improvement required in the graphical interface of your web design? That can engage more audiences and make them stick to it.

That’s why you need this frontend development guide! No matter how excellent the products/services you offer, the users will take only 0.05 seconds to create an opinion, of which 94% is related to the front end design. 

Thus, maintaining an optimized front end application is crucial, as the user experience is what decides the web projects’ performance, scalability, and reliability. 

Let’s move further on best practices to consider for maintaining top-notch standards in each of those segments, starting with the detailed version of front end definition.

What is Front End Development?

The term front – end defines itself; the interface that interacts with the client-side browser, including content delivery, style guide, graphs/tables, typography or font, buttons, and the navigation menu. 

An individual who writes code of front end languages is known as a frontend dev or developer. The work of the front end is to create a responsive web layout that is appealing by nature but also has reduced page load time. 

Most of all front-end architecture includes HTML, CSS, and javascript. When it comes to front end practice, these three programming languages set the core of the basic structure, design system, and how the front end components will respond on tap, which is the back-end term.

Difference Between Front End Development & Back End Development

Front end UI is what reflects the visual aspects of web apps, whereas back end developments include the database, storage, and architecture that assures a potent content delivery network.

A user can’t directly interact with the back end, but the results they receive do get delivered by the back end. Hence, both sides are similarly crucial for developing a robust software/application.

These practices are conducted mainly by two different IT teams combining the best-suiting programming language and framework. Need to avoid handling such technological terms? You can get hands-on both web design services and web development experts under one roof! That delivers appealing front end code and scalable back-end architecture.

Top Frontend Programming Languages for Better UI

Front end designer is the one who designs and illustrates how exactly the web visual graphics should be using tools such as Figma, Adobe XD, and Webflow. Once it gets confirmed by the project leader, the frontend web developer writes the code creating the same visual effects. Front end web developers can consider using tools like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket to store and manage project files.

Top 3 Front End Programming Languages:

1. HTML

Also known as HyperText Markup Language is a markup language; which is considered the first layer to create any web pages. HTML offers the base to wireframe with CSS and javascript files. Also, this markup language offers familiarity with all browsers and easy integration with any other languages or framework.

2. CSS

Cascading Style Sheets, mostly known as the system design blueprint among front end dev – is a language to design front end turning HTML content into an appealing website with responsiveness in all layout dimensions including desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. The new tendency also uses CSS preprocessors to create the preprocessor’s unique syntax and also reduces styling efforts through “usability” and quick scalability. This CSS preprocessor includes Less, Sass, and stylists that improve the development process

3. Javascript

Known mainly by its acronym js, it is a customer-side programming language helping front-end engineers in website functioning across multiple programs. This coding language also offers a collection of prewritten code snippets in the form of a JavaScript library that can be integrated with the rest of the front end coding languages and conclude in a successful development project.

Scalable Front End Development Frameworks

Where programming language sets the core of frontend development, these frameworks simplify the front end work by helping with quick GUI (graphical user interface) creation and concatenating of external resources.

1. React

Do also get named React JS, which is a Javascript library. React JS helps with a set of features, including interactive user interfaces and reusable components. The top advantage of using React is its fast development process which always keeps your business on the bars of website trendings. But wait! Is your current web API aligning with current web trends? Here’s our guide to top web design trends you can inspect!

Not only this, multinational companies, including Netflix, Facebook, Dropbox, Walmart, and Airbnb, also trust it. You can also speed up development with its write-once code characteristic, with which you can create once and use the same code everywhere. React integrates well with top programming languages, including Node.JS, Laravel, and WordPress CMS. You can also hire dedicated front-end developers to conduct best practices for your front-end project.

2. Angular

Angular JS is an open-source front-end framework based on the TypeScript programming language. This javascript framework is developed by Google itself, aiding programmers to build interactive and dynamic web projects. 

Front-end designers can use HTML5, or even HTML extended syntax as a template language or development of web applications without relying on third-party libraries. This TypeScript code is an indeed plus; you can consider – if you want to avoid a bunch of manual code feeds. Angular is a considerably secure front-end framework, which is why it is mainly used for performing unit and end-to-end application testing. 

Already picked Angular for your front-end project development? Dive into the top AngularJS frameworks for web development, and build the most powerful and scalable web app for your business.

3. Vue

It is a popular web front end framework created on javascript, HTML, and CSS only. The significant benefit Vue.js offers is its single-file component-based architecture enabling each project part to be independently testable. Also, Vue.js offers an incredibly lightweight file size of only around 20 KB file size. Vue.js has straightforward coding practices by which an individual with general coding knowledge can also start learning Vue.js.

Vue currently offers 30+ prewritten libraries packed with an array of tools that helps in enhancing functionalities. Want a curated index of the most useful Vue UI libraries? Here is the updated guide to the best Vue UI Component Libraries. E.g., the npm package of Vue CLI gets globally installed to scaffold a new project via Vue Create instantly.

 How about stepping into the battle of these three top front end technologies? Learn who wins among Angular vs React vs Vue.

Front End Development Best Practices

Whether you are planning for software development, app development, or building a web app, there is always room for front end best practices to consider. Our ultimate guide mentioned below will help you with steps to achieve the same and scale your front-end development higher.

Build Better Interfaces

1. First, Clean Up the HTML Document:

HTML is the first layer of any front-end project, so maintaining clean code is crucial. If this core file is not clean, you won’t be able to integrate well with other languages and might need clarification when looking for specific tags. Here are the measures to maintain a clean HTML file:

• Strict DOCTYPE
• Character Set & Encoding Characters
• Proper Indentation
• Keep CSS And JavaScript External
• Nest Tags Properly
• Eliminate Unnecessary Divs
• Use Better Naming Conventions

If you are unfamiliar with those terms and still looking to improve your front end system design experience via HTML caching – hiring an expert web developer for your dedicated project can be the best option to take.

2. Reduce External HTTP Requests

Often, a large portion of frontend practice projects load comes from external HTTP requests. This speed of external resources can vary depending on the hosting provider’s server infrastructure, location, etc.

When reducing external HTTP requests, you should examine your website with a minimalist outlook. Also, inspect each component of web pages, and consider removing elements that do not improve the experience of your visitors. 

In these features, the clutter must be included in the form of:

• More loading time taking images
• Unnecessary JavaScript
• Exaggerated CSS
• Inactive plugins

Once you are done with this, you better focus on trimming the remaining content; you can use comprehensive tools, prefetching, and CDN services. 

3. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

This step stands for removing unnecessary or redundant data that takes excessive time to load. The process includes eliminating code comments, white space characters, unused codes, and newline characters. By minification, your front end website will load faster.

Check out the following tools to generate an optimized version of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript codes:

HTML: PageSpeed Insights, HTML Minifier.

CSS: cssmin.js, Coverage tool of Chrome Dev Tools 

JavaScript: JSMin, Coverage tool of Chrome Dev Tools.

Add Front End CSS Frameworks

Using a CSS framework is considered one of the best front end web design practices for achieving efficiency. Depending on the front-end project needs, front end experts may choose from different languages including Bootstrap, Foundation, or Material Design to speed up graphical UI development.

These CSS frameworks include ready-to-use components replacing manual code efforts and aligning with responsive web design standards. With CSS framework websites get built faster and render correctly on a number of devices including smartphones, tablets, notebooks, and desktop computers.

Consider Using the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) Principle

Go for refactoring rather than repeating! This piece stands for extracting content into methods, services, or class hierarchies as per the requirements of the circumstances. With this approach, you’ll get multiple opportunities to improve practices in front-end development.

• Easier to maintain code
• Fewer bugs
• Adds more clarity to your code
• Narrows down the IDE performance in the long run
• Reduce the application’s performance for the end-user

Enable Prefetching

This practice gets operated by the entire front-end developer community; it enables web browsers to pre-load the resources which support front-end design with an optimized loading speed and improved user experience. Prefetching loads the resource in anticipation of the users to reduce the waiting time of the resource. There are mainly three types of prefetching among which link prefetching is the most popular and widely used method and the other one is DNS prefetching:

Link Prefetching

It enables the browser to gather information that can be requested by the user in the nearest future. However, this type of prefetching only works with resources that are cacheable such as images and JavaScript.

DNS Prefetching

This attempt is particularly built for domain name resolution, by enabling this prefetching the browser will allow the DNS lookup to take some time in looking for web page links in the background while displaying the current page minimizing the latency when a user clicks.

Looking for Front Development Services that can Help You Grow?

We are all set to get that done for you! We are front end development company, leading in the industry for the last 5+ years providing top front end development services. Our offerings include custom frontend, cross-platform, and frontend user interface development integrating the best development tools/technologies with 250+ successful projects recorded in front end web development. Request a free quote today to estimate the makeover of your digital appearance.