Design Easier with Frameworks

If you’ve ever tinkered with creating a website, then you know that writing CSS and designing a professional looking website can be a long process. Perhaps you aren’t a great designer or are simply more interested in other areas of web development. Fortunately, there are frameworks and libraries in web development whose purpose is to enhance your designs in less time and generally make designing websites much easier.

A CSS framework is essentially a library that contains customizable templates which can be applied to your web page. A CSS library is very similar, the main difference being that a CSS library is not meant to be a full-fledged tool for an entire design but is usually smaller and more specified. Luckily for web developers, there are a number of great frameworks and libraries that you can use to enhance your CSS today. Choosing a framework/library to use is highly subjective, as each of them provide their own set or strengths and weaknesses and different design patterns. Unless you’re already well-versed in many frameworks and libraries, however, it is usually a good idea to start with the most popular/notable frameworks.

 


I recommend learning Bootstrap CSS first. It is one of the most popular CSS frameworks because it is easy to use, has lots of community support, requires less code than other frameworks, and can create a variety of appealing and responsive designs. However, some developers critique Bootstrap since it is not known for emphasizing customizability (it is customizable by modifying the source code) and many websites that use it tend to have a similar theme. That said, there certainly are several other CSS frameworks that I recommend looking into as well such as Tailwind CSS, which is known for breaking things down into components and allows for highly customizable designs, Foundation, which is very large and elaborate but may be more advanced, and Bulma CSS, which is relatively new and offers modern designs. Other notable mentions are Materialize, Semantic UI, UIkit, and Skeleton UI.

On the other hand, CSS libraries can add that extra bit of flair that can really bring your website to the next level. CSS libraries can bring new elements to your design such as animations, fonts, buttons, and even 3D graphics. Some popular CSS libraries include Animate.css, CSS wand, Destyle.CSS, Water.css, Rain.css, Font Awesome, Ionic, and Pure.css.


So, if you’d like to create more elaborate designs and enhance your website user experience, then it’s a great time to pick up a CSS framework/library!

Thanks for reading!

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