24 Oct How to Learn Web Design from Your Mistakes

The web isn’t made from a single monolithic framework. It’s that much harder to learn all the pieces that makeup everything we see on the internet because of its modularity. 

Anyone is bound to make mistakes that slow down development time, your program, or introduce bugs to your program. Not only that, but some kinds of mistakes put you at a disadvantage when you’re looking for a job.

Best practices exist to ensure as few issues as possible come up when designing your website or launching it into production. Here are the five most common mistakes junior web developers make and how to avoid them.

Over-relying on jQuery

jQuery is by far the most popular JavaScript framework in the world. Adopting it in your project as soon as you’ve created it may seem tempting, but don’t be in such a rush. 

While jQuery does provide a lot of convenient methods to speed up your web development, it’s important not to use it too much. New web developers almost always make the mistake of understanding jQuery’s API methods rather than how they work underneath. 

A lot of employers consider jQuery a liability rather than a nice-to-have because some developers fail to understand how JavaScript works altogether.

Nothing is wrong with using jQuery. If you can, get used to using JavaScript methods on your own. Only rely on jQuery for convenience methods that would otherwise take a while to implement.

Over-relying on CSS frameworks

CSS frameworks like Semantic UI and Bootstrap can save a lot of time. They take away the need for manual styling and incorporating responsive design inside of your app. 

Just like jQuery, however, it’s easy to get sucked into the cycle of never writing your own CSS code. At the end of the day, your site will look generic and half-done. On the extreme end of things, it might even look like a dozen other websites that had the same idea as you.

If you are not an expert in writing a CSS code, you will have the ability to read manuals, to find a mentor, who will provide you with the information you needed, like as a research guide will write a research paper for me and provide you with good and qualitative help. There are different frameworks that could be more intuitive for writing code.

Frameworks like Bootstrap exist to make your life easier. To avoid over-reliance, learn CSS styling by itself, learn how to use preprocessors to speed up development, and study color theory to know what colors go together and which don’t. Once you properly understand the concepts, you might realize you don’t even need the frameworks anymore.

Not Having a Recovery Tool

Not having a recovery tool when you need it the most can result in the crash of your website and its possible demise. Whenever you make a change to your website, you are risking it not being good. To ensure you have a safety net you can fall into, think about utilizing a recovery tool, such as WP Reset.

WP Reset is your best solution when problems on your website arise. Maybe the problem is not being able to access your WP admin or the encounter with the white screen of death. Whatever it may be, WP Reset has your back. It comes equipped with helpful cleaning tools that will allow you to quickly and easily recover your website.

In addition, you can use it to quickly install any plugins and themes, or disable them if they are faulty. Furthermore, WP Reset’s feature Snapshots automatically takes a snapshot of your website before you make any change to it, allowing you to recover that snapshot if things don’t go as planned.

The most powerful option this plugin provides is the Nuclear Reset option, which allows you to completely wipe clean your installation, remove all of the plugins, themes, and database entries. However, use it only when you really need it.

Forgetting to optimize your site for speed

One effect of over-relying on jQuery is the tendency to fall into a habit of anti-patterns. When the browser first loads, the JavaScript and CSS code need to be executed before the page is loaded, depending on where you place your scripts. 

As you can imagine, having too many scripts is going to slow down your website. Having unused CSS classes will increase the bundle size of your website and similarly slow it down.

A lot goes into speed optimization. To name a few factors: fonts, images, additional JavaScript and CSS files, and file compression all play their role. Once you’ve mastered these, look into package bundlers like Webpack and Rollup that can remove unused CSS classes and JavaScript methods from your files.

Incomplete input validation

Some of the most important parts of any website you ever build are forms. Since it’s the only way a person can pass information to your server, it’s always necessary to do some sanity checks on them. 

Some of the most common attack vectors on the internet are still XSS attacks and SQL injection. The mistake junior developers tend to make is to only have input validation on the frontend.

All input validation is done via JavaScript, which is trivial to disable. That said, Kenneth Sytian of Sytian Web Developer Philippines recommends to always carry out input validation on both the backend and frontend. Besides, all non-alphanumeric characters should be escaped to make injection attacks impossible.

Ignoring the importance of SEO

It’s not enough that you build beautiful websites and ship them. It’s equally important that people see and appreciate the content you have on offer. The best way to do that is to improve your SEO knowledge and implementation of it.

SEO is a long and complicated process that needs constant research to remain in the loop of the ever-changing rules of the game. With its arching reach, it should not be dismissed to be done at the end of the development process. 

Some practices, such as always having descriptive ‘alt’ tags on your images, need to be actively processed. Imagine scanning all your files to look for alt and meta tags when you’re already done with the project.

Not having a favicon

It’s easy to dismiss the favicon as being unnecessary because of how trivial it is to set up, but its existence is pretty important. On the modern web, it’s common for users to have multiple tabs open so they can visit them again later. Favicons act as a sort of bookmark so your site is visible at a single glance. The lack of one may mean users lose interest along the way.

Rather than generate one yourself in Photoshop, award-winning UX designer, Michelle Dipp, recommends using free graphic design tools that you can find online. You can even find one that offers favicon templates so you can make your own without hassle.

Ignoring responsive design

Responsive design ranks amongst one of the most important things a website should have. Most traffic on the internet is from mobile devices. Not having a site that displays different content depending on the screen size puts you at a significant disadvantage. That’s especially so if your competitors offer the same.

One way you can improve the user experience is by implementing sticky elements to your website. Sticky elements are those which remain fixed on the page while the user is browsing. When the elements are fixed, it’s easier to access them and you know they are always in one place, which is essential when on a mobile phone.

That being said, WP Sticky is the perfect plugin you can use to make your sticky elements. WP Sticky allows you to make as many elements sticky as you want, without writing a single line of code; you just have to pick your element right from the screen.

With WP Sticky, you can make your menu, header, footer, and much more, sticky. Furthermore, you can adjust the element’s position, opacity, and add it or remove it from a specific post.

Besides, it’s one of the factors Google takes into account when ranking pages. If your page isn’t responsive on mobile, you’ll likely get a few emails from the webmaster’s console warning you to update your site.

Conclusion

Proper web design takes time. Time to research, time to work, and even more time to get used to recommended practices. Making a mistake over during development time isn’t the end of the world. Instead, take any setbacks you encounter as a learning experience. Improve your knowledge and application of proper web design using them.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Becky Holton is a journalist and a blogger at Bestdissertation.com, best essay writing service. She is interested in education technologies, expert writing and is always ready to support informative speaking at AustralianWritings. Follow her on Twitter.