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Briuana Jackson
2,643 PointsShould Designers Use Templates?
I was just wondering, as an aspiring web designer and web developer, is it acceptable to use a template such as twitter bootstrap, zurb, dreamweaver, biolerpate and etc, or should I hand-code my html/css from scratch in order to have more "control" over my code and debugging.
2 Answers
James Barnett
39,199 PointsPersonally I think that Frameworks like Zurb foundation & Bootstrap add in too much to start with. You need to learn to walk before you run.
So learning the principles of:
- fluid grids
- flexible images
- media queries
- good typography
Then maybe add in a pre-processor such as sass or less
Once you've got those down you will be better able to work on a large site that is already using a framework. However I'm a firm believer in not solving problems you don't have yet.
I highly recommend you check out this article for a great prespective on grid frameworks
Finally, I'll leave you with my favorite quote on frameworks:
Make sure every bit of code added to your project is there for a reason you can explain, not just because it is part of some standard toolkit or boilerplate.
Ben Russell
3,667 PointsGreat quote James!
I was thinking about frameworks last night, and how bloated some are. Is there (and if there isn't there should be) a service whereby you can submit the HTML and CSS files, that then checks to see what CSS is used, and creates a new minimized CSS, removing any unused, unnecessary code? (If it doesn't exist, I wish I had the skill base to know how to build such a tool).
Ben Russell
3,667 PointsAh cool - I didn't just devise a new tool (damn)...but good to know none the less.
Briuana Jackson
2,643 PointsThanks for the suggestion about tools to remove unused CSS. But even so I would rather add HTML/CSS files rather than go through the works of checking out all of the unused files due to a heavy framework.
Briuana Jackson
2,643 PointsBriuana Jackson
2,643 PointsJames, that is an excellent quote, and the articles you suggested are excellent. I have friends who are professional web designers who use frameworks such as Zurb foundation and Bootstrap. Unfortunately when they are coding their HTML/CSS is seems that they spend a significant amount of time tweaking these frameworks and stripping their down due to an unnecessary amount of divs, classes, and etc. Plus personally I want to be informed about all the code I use, too many times I have seen designers who can not explain or fix the codes in their design.