What are the most important web development skills for optimizing social media sharing?

HTML is foundational for webpages: it provides the content that is in the page itself, it’s checked by search engine crawlers to evaluate and rank your page, and it’s how users with accessibility needs can understand your page. Fortunately, it’s also easy to learn! I recommend checking out freecodecamp.org or w3cschools.com and taking their HTML courses. Once you have a good grasp of HTML, study CSS, and then Javascript. Knowing these three coding languages will give you great ability to work on websites!

In addition to the knowledge of HTML and CSS to create visually appealing and shareable content, understanding of metadata and Open Graph tags to control how shared links appear on social media platforms is also needful. Another plus is familiarity with social media APIs to integrate sharing functionalities into your website.

Javascript is very powerful, but oftentimes it is verbose or burdensome to use in its basic form. For that reason, there have been many Javascript libraries and frameworks invented that give developers helpful utility functions, which are like shortcuts to do things in Javascript. jQuery is one of these Javascript libraries. It is used less often these days as other libraries like React.js, Vue.js, and Angular.js have become more popular. I would recommend you learn Javascript first, then explore which Javascript libraries are good to learn for the type of websites you want to make.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to attract a large volume of relevant traffic from Google and other search engines. The main areas of SEO include on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. On-page SEO involves structuring your page and using content in it that helps search engines know what it is about. Off-page SEO involves getting other relevant, quality websites to link to your website through link-building outreach. Technical SEO involves optimizing the performance of your website so it loads fast, has a good mobile layout, and offers a good user experience. SEO is a field in itself and there's a lot to learn for it. I recommend checking out SEMrush Academy for good courses on SEO.

CMS stands for content management system. A CMS enables people to make a great website with low code or no code needed. There are many different CMS solutions out there, but Wordpress is undoubtedly the most popular, as it is said nearly half of all websites on the internet use Wordpress. Wordpress is a free CMS that allows you to integrate many plugins that can be free or paid. Other CMS solutions are paid, such as Webflow, Wix, Shopify, etc and offer more functionality for design, ecommerce, and analytics out of the box. To choose a CMS for your company, consider the needs and goals for your website and how much technical know-how you have on your team. Wordpress is a good solution for low and high tech teams, so it's a good safe choice.