What does a web designer/developer needs to know in 2023?
April 15, 2023 10:18 PM Subscribe
I've been out of work a while, with a spotty work history. So I am far outside the loop on what kind of things web designers/developers need to know. Ignoring the difficulties of going back to work with a spotty history, what are the technical things I should try and at least familiarize myself with? Is there much space for a web designer/developer these days?
I last worked at a university career center maintaining their website, but it was a limited, part time role. It was some design, lots of wordpress management, some content development. That was 2020. Prior, I worked as a Digital Experience Manager, in 2017. It was a glorified UX designer - it wasn't meant to be, but it was a huge mess and the position was eliminated so I was only there for 6 months, but I went to Adobe Summit in 2017, and had (I felt) a strong lay of the land. I also went to An Event Apart in Seattle in 2016.
PRIOR to that, I had another long stint out of work and my last job was a UX/UI designer at an ecommerce company that ended in 2012. But it was more web design and frontend dev, email marketing, banner ads, some print. That's been more or less my previous work history, other than very early on when I did some technical support, networking work and web server work/support.
I don't really want to go back into pure UX, and I'm obviously not going to be at the top of the resume pile, but I want to have at least some idea of the systems to think about with design/dev. At one point, I was a wicked front end dev and I still remember A LOT, (I still tinker in dev tools). However, I wasn't doing it much when frameworks became big. Like I know little about bootstrap. I know what it is, kinda poked around, but was a semantic HTML purist so didn't pay much attention.
Decent at wordpress as a content management system (at least I was), can write some php, was proficient at jquery although I'm SURE I'm rusty. Haven't used react but I see it mentioned a lot. Can hobble together SOME python. Used to be able to do work in mysql but its been a while. Comfortable with command line. Done very little with apps other than some recent tinkering with ios/xcode with ChatGPTs help.
On the design side, I am rusty with creative suit. I was good at photoshop, good at illustrator, proficient at In Design, (same with flash but well, flash, heh) Touched XD a couple times. I was using photoshop the other day for the first time in YEARS to make a small and I remember more than I thought I would, although apparently my brain deleted most of the kb shortcuts.
I also don't know what is going on in the marketing side, with things like social, tiktok was before my time.
Obviously I'm not going to be able to learn everything all at once, but I want to at least go through some tutorials (say for react, and to brush up on python) and just familiarize myself with where the industry is. I still pay attention to tech, but just on the periphery. My main tech podcast is "Your Undivided Attention" since "Reply All" went away.
I last worked at a university career center maintaining their website, but it was a limited, part time role. It was some design, lots of wordpress management, some content development. That was 2020. Prior, I worked as a Digital Experience Manager, in 2017. It was a glorified UX designer - it wasn't meant to be, but it was a huge mess and the position was eliminated so I was only there for 6 months, but I went to Adobe Summit in 2017, and had (I felt) a strong lay of the land. I also went to An Event Apart in Seattle in 2016.
PRIOR to that, I had another long stint out of work and my last job was a UX/UI designer at an ecommerce company that ended in 2012. But it was more web design and frontend dev, email marketing, banner ads, some print. That's been more or less my previous work history, other than very early on when I did some technical support, networking work and web server work/support.
I don't really want to go back into pure UX, and I'm obviously not going to be at the top of the resume pile, but I want to have at least some idea of the systems to think about with design/dev. At one point, I was a wicked front end dev and I still remember A LOT, (I still tinker in dev tools). However, I wasn't doing it much when frameworks became big. Like I know little about bootstrap. I know what it is, kinda poked around, but was a semantic HTML purist so didn't pay much attention.
Decent at wordpress as a content management system (at least I was), can write some php, was proficient at jquery although I'm SURE I'm rusty. Haven't used react but I see it mentioned a lot. Can hobble together SOME python. Used to be able to do work in mysql but its been a while. Comfortable with command line. Done very little with apps other than some recent tinkering with ios/xcode with ChatGPTs help.
On the design side, I am rusty with creative suit. I was good at photoshop, good at illustrator, proficient at In Design, (same with flash but well, flash, heh) Touched XD a couple times. I was using photoshop the other day for the first time in YEARS to make a small and I remember more than I thought I would, although apparently my brain deleted most of the kb shortcuts.
I also don't know what is going on in the marketing side, with things like social, tiktok was before my time.
Obviously I'm not going to be able to learn everything all at once, but I want to at least go through some tutorials (say for react, and to brush up on python) and just familiarize myself with where the industry is. I still pay attention to tech, but just on the periphery. My main tech podcast is "Your Undivided Attention" since "Reply All" went away.
I think there's still a lot of call for Wordpress skills, but you'll find that a lot of things have changed in terms of getting HTML up onto the page.
A lot of the CSS tricks you'd be familiar with are actively harmful now that CSS can simply and easily make a grid and make a box that can center and space everything correctly. Typically, a framework is used to generate the HTML and layout for you, written in JavaScript, or, increasingly commonly, TypeScript. JQuery is still used but it's not as essential; most of what you used it for can now be done natively.
posted by Merus at 12:38 AM on April 16, 2023
A lot of the CSS tricks you'd be familiar with are actively harmful now that CSS can simply and easily make a grid and make a box that can center and space everything correctly. Typically, a framework is used to generate the HTML and layout for you, written in JavaScript, or, increasingly commonly, TypeScript. JQuery is still used but it's not as essential; most of what you used it for can now be done natively.
posted by Merus at 12:38 AM on April 16, 2023
I’ve drifted away from Web for a few years to do apps but you mentioned Bootstrap. I feel like it and its widgets might be passé. Anecdotally I took some ribbing for still using Bootstrap in 2021 instead of something like Tailwind in a tech test.
posted by johngoren at 3:15 AM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by johngoren at 3:15 AM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
In some ways I fear this isn't easily and comprehensively answerable because you're asking about everything from UX and design, through front end development to back end development, and not restricted to any specific size or kind of organisation, project or website. There are going to be so many correct answers depending on all these variables.
There will be places doing things pretty much the same as when you last did this stuff - it hasn't been that long.
There will be places that use things like Bootstrap or Tailwind (which I hear a lot more these days, so definitely worth looking at). And places that use neither and write CSS from scratch (worth searching out recent articles on things like Smashing Magazine because that seems to change rapidly).
There will be places that use React or Vue or other front end frameworks. There will be places that don't use any of them.
There won't be much jQuery these days, except on legacy sites - the cracks between browsers that it papered over have been largely resolved and vanilla JS does its job now. (Chris Ferdinandi has lots of great resources for getting up to speed with vanilla JS.)
It's possible kschang and I mean different things by "full stack" but I'd have said there's much fewer full stack developers than there once were, and people have become much more specialised in their roles. The exception being if there's only one or two of you responsible for a site.
Practically, I'd look at a load of job ads for roles you might conceivably apply for and see what the frequent buzzwords are among them. That will help you narrow this down to a few things to focus on.
posted by fabius at 5:14 AM on April 16, 2023 [3 favorites]
There will be places doing things pretty much the same as when you last did this stuff - it hasn't been that long.
There will be places that use things like Bootstrap or Tailwind (which I hear a lot more these days, so definitely worth looking at). And places that use neither and write CSS from scratch (worth searching out recent articles on things like Smashing Magazine because that seems to change rapidly).
There will be places that use React or Vue or other front end frameworks. There will be places that don't use any of them.
There won't be much jQuery these days, except on legacy sites - the cracks between browsers that it papered over have been largely resolved and vanilla JS does its job now. (Chris Ferdinandi has lots of great resources for getting up to speed with vanilla JS.)
It's possible kschang and I mean different things by "full stack" but I'd have said there's much fewer full stack developers than there once were, and people have become much more specialised in their roles. The exception being if there's only one or two of you responsible for a site.
Practically, I'd look at a load of job ads for roles you might conceivably apply for and see what the frequent buzzwords are among them. That will help you narrow this down to a few things to focus on.
posted by fabius at 5:14 AM on April 16, 2023 [3 favorites]
I'd recommend browsing around sidebar.io a bit, it's a collection of curated articles that does a very good job of highlighting what's happening in the web dev/design world.
It's a couple of years old, but this article "The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers" by Chris Coyier does an excellent job of summarizing the state of web development.
Here's a fresh off-the-griddle article called "The End of Front-End Development" by Josh Comeau that I wish had a less clickbaity title, but it also starts with a bit of historical context and should help you get your bearings on the discussions that are happening today in the web dev space.
posted by jeremias at 5:22 AM on April 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
It's a couple of years old, but this article "The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers" by Chris Coyier does an excellent job of summarizing the state of web development.
Here's a fresh off-the-griddle article called "The End of Front-End Development" by Josh Comeau that I wish had a less clickbaity title, but it also starts with a bit of historical context and should help you get your bearings on the discussions that are happening today in the web dev space.
posted by jeremias at 5:22 AM on April 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
There's such a huge variety of work (due in part to complexity that is actually needless) these days that it's better to figure out what specific jobs you want, then work backward from there to figure out what you need to know to do the work and what you need to know to get the job (which are sometimes two different things).
Once you know what the technologies you need to know are, if you have really strong JS and CSS fundamentals, I don't think you'll have any trouble learning any particular current technology. And PHP knowledge can't hurt because there is still so much Wordpress work out there.
posted by ignignokt at 9:05 AM on April 16, 2023
Once you know what the technologies you need to know are, if you have really strong JS and CSS fundamentals, I don't think you'll have any trouble learning any particular current technology. And PHP knowledge can't hurt because there is still so much Wordpress work out there.
posted by ignignokt at 9:05 AM on April 16, 2023
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Backend will depend on the shop, usually Node.js, some shops use Python/Flask or Python/Django, yet others use other stuff.
posted by kschang at 10:31 PM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]