The demand for web developers has never been greater in an era of digital transformation. With people finding new ways to work, communicate, and shop, technology has been required to facilitate that. Everyone needs to practice their digital skills, particularly if they are devs, and coming up with web development ideas can be taxing.
Practicing and experimenting with web development ensures that you keep up with the latest web technologies and trends, and are able to fulfil customer needs. We have come up with five web development ideas that every dev should practice to enhance their skill set and increase user engagement and interaction. Here is our list to help you develop in your web career.
1. Giphy with a Unique API
In an ever popular social media world that relies on emojis and imagery to communicate, Giphy has been another popular method of communication between peers. One project that can test your abilities is developing a web application that uses search inputs and Giphy API for presenting GIFs on a webpage.
While the documentation is comprehensive, it is relatively easy to follow and is simple to learn and implement – a great beginner project using the Giphy API. If you use the Giphy API, you won’t need to do any requests for an API to be able to utilise it.
Another major positive of using the Giphy API is that you don’t need to worry about configuration while requesting data. When you use the Giphy API to build a web application, there is a search input section where users can search for specific GIFs.
You are also able to display trending GIFs in a column or grid format, and allow more load options at the bottom for versatile search options for GIFs.
(Image Credit: Matt Croak)
2. Develop an SEO-friendly Website
To be found in search results, your business needs to make use of SEO. Websites that neglect SEO won’t be able to drive organic traffic from SERPs or search engine results pages. Functionality is, of course, the main concern of web development, but having a fundamental understanding of SEO and web design is critical when creating a user-friendly site.
Understanding technical SEO and what marketers need can help you build sites that attract visitors, turning traffic into conversions. Some ways to make your site SEO friendly include:
- Integrating social media into your website’s design. Search engines value social media, as do your prospective customers
- Use SEO in your images like alt text and meta descriptions
- Use JavaScript sparingly
- Make sure your URL is user friendly
- Make sure your design is accessible
- Be careful when using flash elements.
Once you have learned more about SEO, you will be able to develop a site that has integrated and responsive design while having user friendly features that interact well with SEO. Another important measure is to ensure that the site loads quickly on desktop and on mobile devices.
3. Create Social Share Buttons
Most websites (particularly, content-based ones) built on WordPress have social share buttons that allow users to share content on various social media platforms. However, for static sites that aren’t based on WordPress, adding social share buttons is a challenge.
In this project, you will take up the challenge of writing a JavaScript code that will allow you to add social share buttons to static sites. While you can do this by incorporating HTML elements or images in the site’s template, using JavaScript allows you to add the share buttons dynamically.
4. Make Toast Notifications
Toast notifications are unobtrusive and non-modal window elements that are used to display brief and auto-expiring information to users. They are primarily used on Android OS platforms and are used to inform the user of something that is not critical and that does not require specific attention. They do not prevent the user from using the app device.
In the case where we just want to notify the users that the action they performed has been successfully taking place or has taken place. For example:
- When you send a message you get a toast notification feedback “Message sent” written on it.
- When you delete some mails; you are notified with “Your mail has been deleted” written on it.
- You are even notified with ongoing action like “Sending Message…” written on it.
Designing a toast notification tool requires you using your JavaScript skills and knowledge. When you create a functional toast notification tool, it can respond to events on the page and notify the users as and when an event has completed successfully. You could also use the setTimeout function to represent the delay in loading or saving data.
5. Develop an AJAX-Style Login
Building the front-end of an AJAX-style login site/page is a great challenge to test the web development ideas that you have. In AJAX-style login, the login page does not need to be reloaded to ensure whether or not you have to input the correct login details.
An Ajax login form can send data to the server and display an error message without requiring a page refresh. This can make the process of logging in less painful for the user.
If you want, you can also create a mockup of both successful and invalid login situations by hard-coding a username and password and compare this to the information entered by a user. You can also include error messages for situations where the input data is incorrect or not found.
Expand Your Web Development Ideas
These are just some web development ideas that are easy and fun to do, honing your skills and making you a better programmer and developer. Companies are becoming more and more reliant on their developers to deliver innovative solutions and flexibility for their businesses needs.
Keeping in touch with trends and practicing different web development ideas will make you a more competent developer and help you transform websites and applications. Need help with web development and want expert advice? Contact ProfileTree today to see how we can help your business.
