Whether you are currently a web coder or are thinking about potentially becoming one, having online resources available at your fingertips is important in staying up to date on industry happenings, technology, and tools. This article offers 23 of the best online resources for the web coder including associations, blogs, forums, exam prep sites, non-education certifications, webmaster tools, images, and font resources.
Associations
Becoming a member of a web coder association can help you network, complete learning modules, and find a job in the web design field. Here are a few of the best associations available online.
International Web Association – IWA is the industry’s recognized leader in providing educational and certification standards for web professionals. IWA supports more than 300,000 individual members in 106 countries.
Association of Web Design Professionals – AWDP offers a directory of members to help get contracts to complete web design projects. The AWDP also lists positions in the tech industry for industry web coders.
Blogs and Forums
Blogs and forums are great ways to engage with the web coder community, learn new techniques, and share knowledge. Here are a few of the best blogs and forums online.
DevShed – DevShed combines coding tutorials with an active forum. The website also offers language tutorials and tools to learn scripting.
Smashing Magazine – Smashing Magazine is a blog that includes articles to help web coders with CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and other coding techniques. It also hosts articles on web design, responsiveness, mobile rendering, graphics, and UX design.
DZone – This is a link-sharing community that offers articles and resources to web coders. DZone also provides free reference cheat sheets, white papers, and original articles.
IBM Developer Works – IBM Developer Works is a community of web coders that offers tutorials and tools.
Exam Prep
The web coder student takes many exams while getting an education at a technical school or to obtain an association certification. Use these online resources to prepare for your next exam.
ProProfs Quiz Maker – ProProfs Quiz Maker offers sample tests for web coding students to practice for a web design exam or certification.
WizIQ – This website offers free web design online practice tests to prepare a web coding student for an exam or certification.
Non-Education Certifications
The web coder can also become certified through many different organizations. Google is the most widely used search engine in the world. Certification from Google will help prove that you are well versed in web design.
Google Developers Certification – Google offers test prep to become certified as a Google Developer.
Associate Android Developer Certification – Becoming certified as an Associate Android Developer demonstrates the type of skill that an entry-level Android developer should have.
Google Mobile Sites Certification – This certification tests your knowledge of mobile website development. The focus of the Mobile Sites exam is on value proposition of mobile websites, how to improve mobile website speed, how to create an effective user experience for mobile websites, and advanced web technologies.
Google Analytics Academy – Google Analytics Academy helps you learn about Google’s analytics measurement tools. There are four courses that include Google Analytics for beginners, Advanced Google Analytics, eCommerce Analytics, and Google Tag Manager fundamentals.
Webmaster Tools
While creating, testing, and optimizing a website, web coders will need the best online resources to analyze their websites and understand any technical issues their sites might have. A few other online resources help the web coder test the page speed of the website and check to make sure all the pages are rendering properly. Here are a few of the best online webmaster resources.
Google Search Console – The Google Search Console helps web coders track their sites’ search performance online, offers information about how to improve crawlability of the website, shows how the website looks in Google, and instructs coders how to choose keywords customers use to get to the website.
Bing Webmaster Tools – Bing Webmaster Tools helps web coders get insight into their sites on Bing. See how your site is performing, review reporting tools to help focus on increased traffic, review diagnostic tools to learn about how people find your website, and get notifications to let you know when something needs a technical fix.
Google Developers PageSpeed Tool – This helps to analyze a web coder’s website performance and see how to make a website render faster. PageSpeed Insights uses a 100-point scale to rate the performance of a website on a desktop or mobile device.
GTmetrix – GTmetrix helps web coders analyze their websites and improve their sites’ rendering speed to help them load faster. A website shouldn’t take more than five seconds to load or Google will penalize the website and the user may use the back button to find a competitor.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider – This is a desktop program which crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, script, and apps to evaluate onsite SEO. Screaming Frog helps the web coder find broken links, view the title and description tags, audit redirects, discover duplicate content, generate XML sitemaps, and review robots and directives.
Firebug Firefox Extension – This extension is used to debug issues with front-end code and CSS. Firebug also inspects HTML and accurately analyzes network usage and performance.
World Wide Web Consortium – W3C is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web.
W3C Markup Validation – The W3C markup validator checks the markup validity of web documents in HTML, XHTML, and other markup languages. It finds broken links, validates RSS and CSS, and identifies if the content is mobile ready.
Images and Fonts
Every web coder needs images, fonts, and tools to help build a website. Here are a few of the best online image and font resources.
Google Fonts – Google Fonts is an online repository of different fonts and the coding to render them on your website. The font code is available to embed on a webpage or specify in CSS.
HailPixel – This is a fun way to pick and compare different color hues with font color codes on your website.
Pixabay – Pixabay offers free stock photos, videos, vectors, and art illustrations. All images and videos are released free of copyright.
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