A freelance web developer has somewhat of a greater challenge doing his or her business because there is no team of specialists. The lone freelancer must know how to code web pages for rendering and interact with databases while looking after the presentation features of the site. So the freelance web developer must have a variety of essential skills because the entire show depends on him or her. What follows are a few must-have skills.

Learn the essentials of HTML and extensible HTML (XHTML). This is the rendering or markup language of the internet and the minimum essential skill for the freelancer in this field. HTML stands for hypertext markup language and is simple to learn actually. XHTML is an extension to original HTML and has stricter coding requirements mostly for standardization and ease of maintenance.

Be familiar with web design standards. Although your clients probably won’t care about these, you’ll appreciate standards when it comes to doing some maintenance or making a change to their sites in the future. The most prominent standard is that that of the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C. An important reason why a developer should be familiar with standards is because they specify parameters for making websites accessible in all types of browsers to include those specifically for people with disabilities.

The freelance website developer should know how to implement CSS. CSS stands for Custom Style Sheets and it is part of the standards specified in W3C. In the early days of web development, pages were laid out using the <table> markup in HTML. This oftentimes resulted in code that was difficult to maintain due to its complexity. Plus, using this type of methodology often led to cross-browser incompatibilities. In other words, a page might look fine when rendered with Internet Explorer but look different in another web browser like Opera.

Last but not least, knowing dynamic programming languages like Javascript will allow the web developer to create interactive websites. You only have to learn basics of Javascript in order to create amazing effects thanks to pre-designed libraries like jQuery. People behind these open source libraries have already done all the hard work for you, and all the complicated functions are built in. With the help of these Javascript libraries you can make websites more user friendly and fun to use.

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