What Are the Benefits of Frontend Mentor?

Many web developers struggle to find jobs. This is especially true for those who have just graduated from university.

Fortunately, there are tools available to help you learn and demonstrate your skills to potential employers. For example, you can utilize a frontend mentor platform to get hands-on experience and hone your skills.

Real-world projects

While many online learning communities provide tutorials and courses, Frontend Mentor offers practical, hands-on front-end coding challenges that result in real-world projects. It’s an approach that’s both effective and engaging, enabling developers to practice their skills in an authentic context while collaborating with fellow community members.

The platform features a number of free and paid challenges, which range from newbie to guru level. Each challenge includes design specifications and starter code.

These challenges are ideal for gaining front-end coding experience, whether you’re looking to build your first website or add another project to your portfolio. Using these templates can also help you practice a variety of programming languages and frameworks, making it easier to get started in your career.

Students can also use the challenge platform to learn about STEM learning, which is largely about designing solutions for real-world problems. For example, one project for middle school and high school students explores the problem of flooding in Bangladesh and how to grow food without water, using both science and engineering techniques.

Community

The Frontend Mentor community is a place where developers can go to practice their skills and get feedback on their work. The platform provides challenges to develop their HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills.

Having launched in 2018, the community has grown to over 50k members and has nearly 100 different design-led challenges to choose from. The Slack community is growing at a rate of 5k new members per month and has a dedicated team of moderators who support the community.

What started out as a resource list for front-end developers has now become a learning community that helps people level up their skills in a hands-on way. It’s living proof that it’s never too early to start something.

From the very first day, people were downloading and completing challenges with their peers. This was a great indicator that people enjoyed the way the challenge worked, and it was very close to real-world workflows.

Challenges

Creating a front-end learning community isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. It usually comes down to content, tutorials or courses — but Matt Studdert started Frontend Mentor with a different approach: he created design challenges for designers and developers to level up their front-end skills.

The site offers a variety of design-led challenges that will help you practice your front-end skills while developing real-world projects. The challenges provide photos of how the challenge should look on desktop and mobile, HTML validation reports and design requirements, README files, starter files (for static assets like images) and instructions for coding the project.

Some of the challenges are quite simple, while others are more advanced. Some of the junior challenges focus on DOM manipulation, form validation, and responsive layout. These are perfect for anyone just starting out on their journey to professional development.

Pricing

Frontend mentor offers a free plan with a few challenges, but they also offer premium options, which are priced based on the level of access and assistance required. Those benefits include the aforementioned features and some additional cool ones, such as full design files, beginning code, and a developer community that enables you to network with other aspiring front end wizards.

As with most online learning platforms, the pricing is a bit opaque, but there are two main options. The aforementioned free plan allows you to work on up to three challenges per month, while premium plans can cost anywhere from $29 to $79, depending on your needs. Other key highlights are the challenges themselves, which range from simple landing page tasks to high-end web app mockups. The site also has a variety of other resources, including an active community and an impressive number of design examples to choose from. The most important thing to remember is to stay on top of your game and make sure you’re taking advantage of the best perks, whether it be access to design tools or access to other talented developers.