Kulture Konnect Blog

Web development is one of the top booming industries today. Learning web development is a lot easier than it used to be. Thanks to the free tutorials available online, you can learn to build a website on your own without even receiving a degree in any IT field. The web development technology is growing rapidly and, from my point of view, there's no stopping it. In fact, every month web tools and applications are launched that can be used in order for us to build awesome websites and applications. These tools make life for a developer easier as they  allow us   to create a powerful application for end users in a short period of time.

If you are planning to become a web developer yourself, aside from HTML, I suggest you get to it and start learning the following essential web development tools:

1. CSS Pre-processors 

The good news is CSS is very user friendly to learn. The syntax is pretty straightforward. However, as you get into detail on the development, you’ll have multiple external stylesheets to handle and an overwhelming amount of CSS lines, which could be a struggle to maintain . 

This is where CSS Pre-processors come in handy. This tool helps with building CSS in an easier manner as it  uses variables and functions just like you are coding PHP or other programming languages. This is useful, especially when you have color backgrounds to maintain, etc. Then there’s a compiler for that pre-processor that will convert your CSS into a browser-compliant format. 

There are a number of CSS Pre-processors to choose from such as: LESS, SASS, Myths and Stylus. LESS and SASS are   the most common.

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2. Task Runners

Task runners help greatly to streamline your work. You can just specify which task you need and the task runner will do all the hard work for you. Before the task runner, if you wanted to compile Sass (the pre-processor we talked about earlier), I recommend that you run Autoprefixer. This is handy for javascripts and CSS. Then minify the resulting CSS each time that you make a change, you would have needed to complete each task separately. This can be a nuisance as you run the task repeatedly.

With a task runner, just specify the task that you want and boom! Voila'! Leave it and it will run your task continuously until you choose to stop; pretty handy, right? Save time and effort clicking and typing just to do a single run.

There are a number of task runners to choose from including Gulp.js, Broccoli.js, Brunch.js, Cake.js, and Grunt.js, just to mention a few. They are all built in Javascript. Gulp and Grunt are   the most widely used by developers.

3. Synchronized Testing Tool 

This is my favorite part when building websites, especially because all of today's websites should be mobile optimized or mobile responsive. Doing your test in different devices manually takes a lot of effort and time. That’s why this, my friend, is for you. There are plugins that you can use, which you can combine with the task runners like Gulp.One plcalled BrowserSync. This awesome plugin helps you test a web page and load it synchronously in different devices as long as you’re in one network. 

So, if you have your laptop, wide desk-top screen, mobile phone, tablets, etc., just make sure to run your task runner with BrowserSync and connect all your gadgets in one network and you are good to go! This plugin offers live reload so you won't reload your devices one by one. Simply  scroll one device and every connected device will follow. 

Looking for a professional to build your website? Contact us here for any questions: http://www.kulturekonnect.com/contacts/

Visit our portfolio for a glimpse of our work here: http://www.kulturekonnect.com/category/marketing-portfolio/website-design/

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