Don’t just sit in the corner and wait for your website to go live. Why not learn about HTML frameworks and their role in building a responsive website? Read on.
The first step in building websites is gathering business requirements. In this stage, you will engage with your developers to work things out. Most of the time, you will focus on the outcome―functionalities, and design. However, expect that they will also discuss the technologies involved.
For example, there will be consultations about HTML5 frameworks. And which one to use? You will discuss what they are skilled at and correlate it with the frameworks that best suit your website.
Now, don’t get stressed as frameworks are not as exhausting as they sound. Frameworks are even quite helpful. They are sets of software tools that support and improve the development process.
Best HTML Frameworks for a Responsive Website
A responsive website is what makes an excellent user experience. Without much further ado, here are the best HTML frameworks that can help you.
Twitter Boostrap
Developers from Twitter created Bootstrap to help web designers build fast and consistent websites. It has many benefits to help teams, especially those who are building from scratch.
Easy to use
For a young development team, Bootstrap offers a “shallow learning curve.” It is easy to set up and provides less complexity in integration. It works well with other web frontend frameworks and technologies such as CSS, or LESS, and others.
Responsiveness
In building a website, there is a parameter called Time to Interactive(TTI). This is the number in milliseconds to make your site fully interactive. Have you experienced visiting a website, and the site appears to be ready, but when the user tries to interact with it, nothing happens? Bootstrap can help you solve this problem with its ready-made classes and features that build a mobile-ready and responsive site.
Fast Development
Website development is a tedious process, but Bootstrap can help you hit the ground running. You can set up your website using Bootstrap’s ready-made coding blocks. Also, it has other features that blend along with other web technologies.
For example, CSS-Less functionalities and cross-browser compatibility methods save ample hours of coding. Additionally, you can customize your website with ready-made Bootstrap themes that suit your requirements.
Support
As Twitter is behind Bootsrap, expect extensive support from a big community. All features are updated, and you can expect help from any problems that your team may encounter.
Foundation
Foundation is an eight-year-old HTML website framework from Zurb. This framework is always on the run to compete with Bootstrap. In its effort to top the race, it continuously improves its performance with its presentation-oriented approach.
Easy to use
Foundation is a command-line power user. This means that it is easy to get started using its Command Line Interface (CLI). It allows for easy integration and installation of plugins and other dependencies. Plus, it has easy-to-use templates available for download.
Responsiveness
Foundation does not only focus on the software side but accelerates hardware integration to achieve responsiveness. This means excellent rendering with the types of devices. Also, it offers smoother animation and less flickering and improves the mobile user experience.
Fast Development
In website development, sometimes there is a mismatch between machines and the size of the project. Foundation aims to solve this problem with its approach to optimize the development process. It has a CLI for faster project development. Also, it has a backend CSS pre-processing that is five times faster than the other frameworks.
Support
Foundation, while not as vast as Bootstrap, has significantly improved its documentation. It contains code examples and clear explanations of the framework’s API. It acknowledges the need for new Foundationeers to provide numerous FAQs and general support.
Skeleton
Skeleton (iSkeleton) is an open-source HTML web framework project from Dave Gamache. It leverages the idea of different devices accessing the Web and provides an alternative to the aging 960 grid system.
Easy to use
Skeleton is not quite easy to set up, especially for beginners.
Responsiveness
Responsiveness can boost online presence, but it requires extra work. With Skeleton, it makes a responsive web page with minimal effort. It optimizes web images, especially when using image sprite. An image sprite is a collection of images put together as a single image to improve page loading speed.
Fast Development
The techniques are not new, and it aids fast development because of its architecture. The framework’s design aims to conserve time and utilize resources efficiently.
Support
Unfortunately, few developers use this framework. However, frontend developers recommend it if you are building projects from scratch.
HTML5 Boilerplate
Launched in 2010, HTML5 Boilerplate continues to evolve as one of the most popular open-source front-end web HTML website frameworks. Its unique attribute is it works efficiently with modern web browsers.
Easy to use
HTML5 Boilerplate is easy to use and saves development time. It has lean and mobile-friendly templates that help developers maximize their efforts.
Responsiveness
In dealing with varied devices (size) and different browsers, HTML5 boilerplate has solutions to these problems. It provides adaptive styling for common HTML elements and responsive modules and widgets.
Fast Development
The underlying methods in building a website are the same, and HTML5 Boilerplate leverages this concept. It offers fast development through its boilerplates. These boilerplates are templates containing all the essential HTML structures. Thus, your development team doesn’t need to build from scratch.
Support
In terms of support, it has numerous documentation but lags behind Bootstrap and Foundation. Its documentation provides extra tricks and tips for a smooth development process.
HTML5 Kickstart
HTML5 KickStart offers an ultra-lean and robust package containing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
Easy to use
It allows designers and developers to collaborate using user-friendly templates and snippets.
Responsiveness
HTML5 Kickstart provides an adjustable grid, flexible images, and automates media queries. It has all the layers of responsive design to cater to different resolution ranges.
Fast Development
Frontend development becomes faster because of HTML5 Kickstart. It provides all the elements in one package to give a head start and saves a lot of time.
Support
It has a small community of support but gains high approval among frontend developers.
Montage HTML5 Framework
Montage is an open-source HTML framework for building modern, single-page web apps. It offers excellent synchronization between the data and UI.
Easy to use
Montage is a great framework to use as it offers a developer-optimized experience. Simply, it has starter template applications and components intended for frontend development.
Responsiveness
This framework deals with the responsiveness requirement using Blueprints. It is a feature that works with dynamic page elements. Dynamic page elements are those web pages that are continually moving, updating, or changing.
Fast Development
To cater to the demand of modern web development, Montage offers a unique approach to not introducing new coding methods. Instead, it uses another entity(API) to create clean and modular code. This allows faster development and quickly notifies all parties of any changes in the development.
Support
It has small community support that might jeopardize the development process if problems may occur in the future.
SproutCore
SproutCore is a framework that follows the MVC architecture pattern. It allows building websites quickly using the Web native-like user experience. This means that users can experience advanced capabilities compared to desktop applications.
Easy to use
SproutCore’s designs work well with the web app features in HTML5. Developers use this framework to build rich native-class apps. Also, it has an explicit state machine for organized, maintainable code and business logic.
Responsiveness
It is built on top of the fastest part of the web tech stack. Therefore, it offers a rich, responsive, and highly optimized view layer.
Fast Development
As other frameworks use different development environments (e.g., Grunt, Gulp, etc.), it can be difficult and time-consuming. SproutCore provides its development environment called Build Tools (BT). BT can manage multiple source files and assets and can optimize processes to deploy top-of-the-class web experiences.
Support
It has robust and growing community support, but most help and upgrades come from CoreSprout’s core team.
Zebra
Zebra is a rich UI open-source framework that follows the Object-Oriented Programming(OOP) concepts. It leverages HTML5 canvas as the backbone of its rendering capabilities.
Easy to use
Developers have full control of its UI component rendering, and its authors claim that you can get the gist of everything in less than five minutes.
Responsiveness
The Zebra methodology works with the HTML5 canvas component. It can create responsive websites as it can render any UI design. Plus, its programming design revolves around organized, supportable, extendable code based on the simple Zebra OOP idea.
Fast Development
You can build professional HTML templates with responsive, fully customizable templates. Just like any large codebase, it has its unique and best practices for organizing and maintaining code. But, still stands out in bridging for optimized deployment.
Support
There are limited support and documentation for issues that may arise in the future.
CreateJS
CreateJS is a suite of open-source JavaScript libraries and tools compiled to build rich and interactive HTML5 content. Unlike sole frameworks, it has five modular libraries used for animation effects, supporting HTML5 audio deployment, etc.
Easy to use
Developers like to use CreateJS as it can work independently or integrate with other frameworks efficiently.
Responsiveness
It provides a responsive and adaptive design on the HTML5 canvas. The special combination of its libraries creates interactive and attractive templates.
Fast Development
Responsive design is not new. However, CreateJS brought a new emphasis on integrating interactive components inside your website.
It does not work solely on pure integration. Keeping it light and fast to deploy makes CreateJS one of the promising HTML frameworks today.
Support
CreateJS has solid backing from tech giants Microsoft, Mozilla, Adobe, and Gskinner. It has a huge following, and its documentation is up to date.
Less Framework
Leaner Style Sheets (Less) framework is a modern frontend framework for building responsive designs. It focuses on a plain and straightforward layout grid framework and can run on both client and server-side.
Easy to use
Less supports a lot of UI and themes for easy deployment. It is plain and simple and does not involve any complex components.
Responsiveness
It uses the CSS grid system for its responsive design architecture. It can build responsive and adaptive websites using their layouts (mobile, tablet, wide mobile, etc.) and typography presets.
Fast Development
Less Framework is simple and offers reusable components. This makes building with multiple layouts fast and efficient.
Support
This framework requires a solid knowledge of HTML and CSS. Its simplicity and philosophy towards progressive enhancement continue to gather support among frontend developers. Thus, you can expect a lot of documentation and support from its community.
Build your team with Us!
HTML frameworks help developers solve problems in modern-day website development. Tedious tasks are cut short and deployed faster. This is primarily the purpose of frameworks―to simplify recurring issues.
At Full Scale, one of our best practices is to utilize the appropriate HTML website frameworks for your business needs.
With the plethora of framework alternatives, you might find it difficult to choose. Our pool of project managers can help you with that dilemma. Also, we have highly skilled frontend developers with expertise in different UI frameworks and libraries.
Not only that, but we also have a pool of software development experts that can pull out those responsive and attractive websites from scratch. Contact us, and let’s build your website together!
