Nobody is above mistake says an old English adage. Anybody can make mistake but taking cognizance of your mistake and not repeating them again is not a quality everyone possess. That's why it's always important to go through your projects and make sure everything is in place.
Over the few months of my journey into being a software developer, I've came across different portfolios of some junior developers. Even though these portfolios look outstanding, there are still one or two things missing in the projects that are being showcased on these portfolios.
This post contains top 5 mistakes most junior developers make when building websites.
1. Responsiveness
Don't know what responsiveness is? Lemme help ya.
Responsiveness is the ability of a website to look good on all devices. What this means is that regardless of any device, your website should look good.
This is one of the common mistakes made by junior developer these days. They can make a website look good on desktop but to make it look good on smartphones and tablets pose as a major challenge to them.
These days almost every Tom and Harry owns a smartphone, the percentage of people surfing the internet with mobile phones keeps increasing making the need for your website to look responsive across all devices.
An unresponsive website is an example of a poor user interface and it also affects how users interact with your site (User Experience). No business, company or startup will hire a developer who can't make their website look good and responsive.
Responsive web design is made possible through the use of fluid length values(em, rem & percentage), advanced CSS (grid and flexbox), and media queries. If you want to learn how build responsive websites, there is a free responsive design course on freecodecamp with certification. Ensure to check it out.
2. Semantic HTML
Most junior and newbie developers are guilty of using divs everywhere while neglecting semantic elements. Was guilty of this too not until when I found out what semantic HTML elements are and how they can be used.
Semantic elements help in add meaning to your pages and it also make your page easily accessible by search engines. Semantic elements make it easy for other developers to read and understand your code.
There are different semantic HTML elements and they include header, footer, aside, footer, main, figure, article, details, nav and the likes.
3. Browser Functionality
When writing those codes and building those projects, verify and make sure everything work fine on all browsers.
Browser functionality is an important aspect of good web design practice you don't want to ignore. Before using any new feature, the first thing you need to do is to find out if it's supported in all browsers and the best way to do that is to use a site called caniuse.com which is a tool for visualizing which front end feature is compatible with which browser.
Not all your users will have the latest version of their browsers installed so you need to provide support to those using old and outdated browsers.
One way of providing support to old and outdated browsers is through fall back methods. A fallback code is a piece of code which serves as the alternate code to be used by the browser if it were unable to use the initial code.
Another method of providing support and making sure your codes work well on old browsers too is to use a script called mordenizr. It's a script which help detect browser support for specific features and add CSS class to the page's body as necessary.
4. Deprecated Code and Obsolete Features
As the industry grow bigger and as more features are being added, so are some features getting obsolete and deprecated.
Avoid using obsolete features in your code since newer features are available. Using deprecated features clearly shows you are lacking behind in the industry and not up to date with latest features and releases. As you know the tech industry is a fast moving one, so is it essential for you to able to catch up with latest happenings.
5. Visible Errors
Here is another mistake junior developers are guilty of these days, not checking the console for errors.
You should always your project incase of errors before you make it live. You can use the Error Console in most browsers to check for errors such as JavaScript-related errors and warnings, CSS errors and arbitrary messages from chrome code.
The End.
Those are the major mistakes I observed most junior developers make. Do you know any other mistakes too that is not covered in this article? Or you're guilty of the above mistakes? Leave a comment below and let fix it together.