Have you ever loaded a website and been seriously impressed by the parallax effect when you’ve scrolled? Maybe you’ve started to navigate away from the tab and a pop-up’s appeared with a data capture field? Pretty smart, right?
Web development is the cool cousin in the world of tech. It turns websites into an awesome space that not only showcases the service, but shows off how good the developer is too!
If you want to be the mastermind behind some seriously impressive websites, you’ll need to have the knowledge to build kick-ass spaces that keep your client happy and entice new clients to your services. Proving your knowledge by getting certified is a sure-fire way to get noticed in the world of web dev.
Here are our essential 4 certificates that will help launch your career and make web development your forever job!
1 - Web Foundations Certification
Before you get started, and particularly if you’re new to the world of web development, you’ll need to build up a bit of foundational knowledge. Understanding the ‘less glamorous’ parts of the job, although not as fun, will help you successfully build websites with the right blocks. For example, understanding the basic functions of web browsers, components of web addresses, plug-ins, add-ons and the DNS will all stand you in good stead.
Got a firm understanding of writing code manually and graphical user interface? If you answered ‘no’ (don’t worry, you don’t have to say it out loud!), then you’d really benefit from the CIW Web Foundations Associates Certification. It cranks your knowledge up a gear so you can get stuck into the meatier certifications (like HTML5 and CSS3) – and then you’ll find you’re building your first website in no time!
2 - HTML Certification
As a web developer you’ll need to be bilingual – but don’t reach for the Spanish phrase book just yet. Of course, we mean being able to read and write HTML. Ahh HTML: the bread and butter for all web developers. HTML (or HyperText Markup Language) is arguably the most important code language you’ll need as a developer. It’s the foundation for all website creation; you can’t create a webpage that looks anything more than a page of unformatted text without it.
HTML consists of tags and attributes that instruct the browser on how to display the web page. For example, your paragraph tag (<p> - to open the paragraph, and <p/> to close it) tells the browser how to render that tag on the page. Similarly,
<a href=http://www.thetrainingroom.com>The Training Room</a> indicates hyperlinked text that takes the user to the specified website. It’s clever stuff that all developers need to know. Not sure what you should pick up for your career goals?
Here are the coding languages you should learn.
3 - CSS Certification
CSS stands for a Cascading Style Sheet, and coupled with HTML is the basics for all websites. CSS is one of those elements that catapults your website from being mediocre, to fantastic! It tells the browser how to display HTML elements, and with your CSS files, you’ll be saving yourself a lot of time. That’s because the CSS file dictates the display rules across multiple webpages at once, with just one file!
Without CSS, you’re faced with a plain text page, nothing visual or aural – forget rollover change buttons. Your CSS is the flesh on the bones of the HTML – sure you can build a site on HTML alone, it just won’t look great or function with the user experience at the fore. Adding this skill to your repertoire is an essential for any aspiring web developer.
Courses like CIW Advanced HTML5 and CSS3 Specialist will build on your manual coding skills and add flesh from CSS to make your code look a certain way. We love CIW as they’re the world’s premier vendor-neutral web and tech educators – perfect for standing out as a well-educated web developer!
4 - JavaScript Certification
Another certification to add to your skillset as a web developer is JavaScript. As the name suggests, it’s a form of scripting language, or script, that enables you to jazz up pages. Nowadays, when you load a web page, it’s uncommon to
not have some sort of interactive element; we’re talking interactive maps, animated graphics and scrollable videos.
Essentially, JavaScript is the script that dynamically updates the content. If HTML is the skeleton and CSS is the flesh, then JavaScript is the clothing! It includes features that responds to operations and commands, and can run independently in the browser. For example, once you’ve assembled HTML and the CSS, you can then implement the dynamic and interactive element of the website. You can change the HTML source attribute of an image tag with the getElementById() method; give it a go –
turn on the light with the JavaScript function here!
The CIW JavaScript Specialist certification enables you to design client facing solutions that are not only fun to do, but will seriously impress your client;
see what the certification includes here.
Coding your way to career success relies on your ability to get certified, and get noticed. If you take a moment to do a quick search online for web development jobs, you’ll see first there are over 12,000 live job ads (that’s just on indeed.co.uk alone). Delving a little deeper, you’ll notice that most conditions of the role require a working knowledge of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 as a bare minimum. By upskilling and getting yourself certified with us, you’re giving yourself a shot at these roles! So, if you’ve got your sights set on becoming a web developer, invest the time in your education, and reap the benefits later – trust us, it’s worth it.
We offer training in web development via our flexible online platform – learn while you work, be supported by our base of experienced tutors and benefit from guaranteed interviews with our partners (including the likes of NTT Data and
GCI Group!)
We’re so confident with the quality of our courses and our student’s abilities, we even offer a job guarantee on IT courses, or your money back. Read the
terms and conditions here.
Learn more about our web development course here