drt_t1gg3r

Thanks for the warm comment. I try my best. I guess it helps that I do front-end coding pretty much every day, and have a good collection of go-to resources, follow and read what the best front-end devs in the industry are writing about.
 
If you are on Twitter these guys are worth following, they are some of the best developers in the industry:
 
Harry Roberts @csswizardry Nicholas Gallagher @necolas Douglas Crockford Nicole Sullivan @stubbornella Paul Irish @paul_irish David Walsh davidwalshblog My Main go to resources are CodeSchool http://www.codeschool.com/ Frontend Masters http://frontendmasters.com/ CSS-TRICKS http://css-tricks.com/ CSS Wizardry http://csswizardry.com/ Hugo Giraudel http://hugogiraudel.com/ Treehouse http://teamtreehouse.com/ is where I first learnt from, it's probably the best resource out there for beginners.

Well it's impossible to know from just looking at the html and those classnames, the css they contain could do anything.
 
But here is an assumption:
The anchor is forming some part of a grid, but how much we don't know. 4 columns of how many? The fact it apeears that the image nested inside ius overlayed by a span tells us that the anchor will have a position of relative and display of block, or inline-block. The span.overlay shouldn't be indented because you cannot nest anything inside an image as it's a self closing tag. The image will give the a.col-four some height The span.overlay will have a position of absolute and the top, right, bottom, left properties all set to zero, this will make it overlay the image. The vertical middle span seems odd because If I were to vertically center a body of text over an image I would set this to display table, width & height 100% Then inside that element I would put another with display set to table cell and vertical align: middle. then you would have an image that could be any height, and a body of text overlaying that again can be any height (so long as it's less than the images height) and it would be vertically centered over the image. That is my assumption but I could be entirely wrong. I suggest you read further into the CSS box model. Understanding this is vital for doing layouts.

There are 100's of ecommerce systems around from minimal cart/checkout scripts like http://www.phpcart.net/php_cart.php right through to uber expensive "enterprise" offerings from IBM. Ecommerce is a complex area where you need to match a solution with your clients requirements, but there's usually a solution available somewhere.
 
I'd suggest trawling script sites like http://www.hotscripts.com/ or http://www.ecommercespot.com/ to see the myriad of options and lean about what's out there. Most CMS's have ecommerce addons as well so there are options for systems like ExpressionEngine, Craft, Drupal, Wordpress etc.
 
 
What do you mean by "incorporating social media" exactly?
 
By "dynamic reactive" pages you mean where the client can manage their own content? Look into Content Management Systesms. Again there are 100's of offering depending on your need. Shopping cart systems are CMS's in their own right, but if you need to manage more general content look at options such as ExpressionEngine, Craft, Statamic, Drupal, Wordpress etc.
 

I'd recommend CodeSchool. Treehouse is also very good, but a lot of their material is more aimed at beginners. Frontend masters is a great resource for intermediate / advanced front-end devs.

To add to what Nock suggested, Treehouse is also very good for covering the fundamentals in just about everything. @niller us front-end guys are not using Flash now, thank god! That technology only ever really took off because of massive browser inconsistencies back in the day, we've come a long way since then... although the technology stack has increased a lot with pre-processors, frameworks, command line task runners like grunt.

With your programming background you are probably familiar with the layer concept or MVC. Back-end is pretty much the web development term for the application layers or the Model where front-end is the view/presentation layer. As Robert Smith explained back-end is usually also the code that gets executed on the server where front-end code in generel is executed on the client side.
Back-end or server side code can be in many different languages. Some needs to be compiled others are interpreted directly from the source.
PHP is the most popular server side language it can be interpreted and executed on standard UNIX server systems with Apache AspX (also called Asp.net) with C# or VB as language executed on windows servers (IIS which I believe also can run PHP). AspX is microsofts modern replacement of classic Asp (classic Asp is a very procedural and linear language build on VB where aspX with C# is object oriented) Python and Ruby are serverside that I'm not personally familiar with but these languages are getting more and more common due to some very popular development frame works. JSP (webapplications with with JAVA as programming language) is as I mentioned before also used for many advanced web applications Finally JavaScipt/Node.js is now also an option for back-end/serverside. Front-end development usually only deals with HTML/CSS and JavaScript but it can of course also include code for browser plugins like Flash, Silverlight etc.

There's plenty of independant back-end developers around. Agencies can outsource complex back-ends that they don't have the expertise to execute for example.
 
Btw I'm not saying you can't freelance as a general web developer who does everything, it's just there's an insane amount to learn. But again you yourself could outsource portions of a project that you are not familiar with.

I'm not a fan of Less, I used Less for over a year before making the switch to Sass about 6 months ago.
 
Less syntax is a bit weird, not a good idea to assign variables to the @symbol when it is already used by things in native css like media querys, the $ sign is more sensible.
Less cannot handle conditionals, you have to do guarded mixins instead which involves far less intuitive syntax
Less cannot do loops, you need to use recursion to simulate them, again not so intuitive. Sass can do while, for, for-in loops.
You can't use a variable in a property name in Less, this is a deal breaker for me, in terms of writing efficient mixins.
Sass allows you to extend one class from another, which can be dangerous if done in the wrong way, still it's a useful tool to have.
Quite literally the only thing Less has going for it over Sass is it's documentation which is very good. But as a whole I don't see any good reason to use Less over Sass, hence I stopped using it.

If you want to learn grunt, which I highly suggest. I wrote a tutorial about getting started
 
 
http://cibgraphics.com/blog/grunt-js-basics-part-1
 
Also a good alternative to Sass\Scss is Less.

+1 for Grunt. Love me some Grunt.

I've always found Hawkwind quite rewarding.

well in his admission he thought it was a rubber toy but hey, some carnivores really like their meat a little more rare than others. It was nothing for my grandfather, after asking how he would like his steak cooked, "drag it across the grill, and then put it on a plate".

I also love to listen music while I am working in my home and in Office. I am currently listening " in my city" song of priyanka chopra. Love this song.

Hahaha "Ozzy bites bats!" grrrrrrr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFacIRsY_F0
 
From Natural Born Killers to bright pink leotards, Juliet Lewis is a multifaceted artist.
 
however, what held me to my keys today while I studied how to make an accordion nav system was this Aussie Slim Dusty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E0aZ387M_I

working on SEO for client and no better music than the Blizzard of Ozz album, especially
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op0T78QAskY

I use to get my partner to play Rock Blues on the piano while I worked lol
 
But usually I listen to some
Kid rock, Artic monkeys, oasis, the black keys..
 
Cant have it loud though - i get distracted to easily

Fell in love with this track ... continental bliss
 

Ah a new year, this makes you think if we work a little long sometimes ...
 

This album on in the studio today, crank it up!
 

My American ignorance is showing again. Because to me you just found a pair of loose fitting panties..... in the fridge.

Hahaha that Grinder recipe says you need 4 'Hoagie' rolls, which I had to Google

well that's good to know. I'm so going to have fun with that one. btw I think in USA we call a bloomer a 'grinder' (hot) or 'sub sandwich' (cold).

My American ignorance is showing again. Because to me you just found a pair of loose fitting panties..... in the fridge.

The ACT Sirius was the first business computer I worked on. The version with a 10Mb hard drive was £2,000 more than the one with twin floppy drives. Most customers didn't need it because you could get MS-DOS, all your ledgers and stock applications on one 1.2Mb floppy and all your data on the other.