More and more people are now accessing the Web on their smartphone and tablet devices than a desktop computer. In fact, already a significant number of people use their smartphones as their only access to the Internet. Thus, it is important for designers and developers to understand how to deal with this entire mobile world. Although, we haven’t entirely figured out how to make all the content we are familiar with seeing at our desk provide an equally pleasing experience on our handheld devices, the technologies and tools for doing that are eviolving and getting better.

A front-end web development framework is simply a collection of production ready HTML/CSS/JavaScript components that we can use in your designs. There are many frameworks out there but some of them stand out from the crowd. For your facilitation below you will find outlined some of the most powerful and popular frameworks available today. Bear in mind that these are not just CSS grids or so, but instead full-featured front-end development frameworks

One of the primary strategies we use when we deal with unknown viewport size is the so-called responsive web design. It’s a mechanism for providing custom layouts to devices based on the size of the browser window. By default, most browsers on small devices such as smartphones and tablets shrink a web page down to fit the screen and provide ways for zooming and moving around the page. Although it technically works, it is not such a great experience. The text is too small to read, the links too small to tap, and all that zooming and panning around is more or less distracting.

The technique of responsive web design is to serve a single HTML document to all devices by applying different style sheets based on the screen size in order to provide the most optimized layout for that device. For example, when the page is viewed on a large desktop browser, the content can be placed into multiple columns with normal navigation elements. But when that same page is viewed on a small smartphone screen, it appears in one column with large links for easy tapping. To see how it works, - just maximize your browser and then resize the window progressively both width and height respectively, and see as the layout changes based on the window size.

Responsive web design is an ingenious solution for dealing with the ever growing myriad of device types. But what are the actual tools and technologies to implement it in designs and developemt? Do we have to be web gurus to handle it or will the essential skills we already have be enough? Are there any tools that can help us?

This is where a very popular front-end development framework comes into play - Bootstrap. Responsive web design is not so hard to implement when you use this brilliant kit - can sometimes be a little bit tricky In the main, it allows you to create responsive, standard-compliant websites with minimum effort while at the same time keeping everything simple and consistent. Frameworks give you a lot of benefits such as speed and simplicity, consistency across different devices, and much more. One of the most important advantages is that they are so easy to use that even a person with minimal knowledge can utilize them without any problem.

To sum up, if you are serious in today’s web development then using this frontend framework (arguable, there are others too) is a must and not an option. Nowadays your site must be extremely flexible in order to satisfy different browsers, tablets, smartphones and a whole bunch of other handheld devices.

Bootstrap Features

Bootstrap is definitely the most popular and widely used framework, nowadays. It’s a beautiful, intuitive and powerful web design kit for creating cross browser, consistent and good looking interfaces. It offers many of the popular UI components with a plain-yet-elegant style, a grid system and JavaScript plugins for common scenarios.

It is built with LESS and consists of four main parts:

• Scaffolding – global styles, responsive 12-column grids and layouts. Bear in mind that Bootstrap doesn’t include responsive features by default. If your design needs to be responsive you have to enable this functionality manually.
• Base CSS – this includes fundamental HTML elements like tables, forms, buttons, and images, styled and enhanced with extensible classes.
• Components – collection of reusable components like dropdowns, button groups, navigation controls (tabs, pills, lists, breadcrumbs, pagination), thumbnails, progress bars, media objects, and more.
• JavaScript – jQuery plugins which bring the above components to life, plus transitions, modals, tool tips, popovers, scrollspy (for automatically updating nav targets based on scroll position), carousel, typeahead (a fast and fully-featured autocomplete library), affix navigation, and more.

Bootstrap Resources:

Bootstrap is already powerful enough to empower any web interface. But in order to make more use of it and making the development process easier, you can find plenty of tools and resources that complement it. Some of them are listed below:

• jQuery UI Bootstrap

  – an awesome resource for jQuery and Bootstrap fans that combines the power of both. It brings nicely the slickness of Bootstrap to jQuery UI widgets.

• jQuery Mobile Bootstrap Theme

  – similar to the jQuery UI theme above, this is a theme built for jQuery Mobile. It is a handy resource if you have a web front-end built with Bootstrap and want to offer a similar look for mobile.

• Fuel UX

  – this extends Bootstrap with additional lightweight JavaScript controls. It’s easy to install, customize, update, and optimize
.

• StyleBootstrap.info

  – Bootstrap has its own customizer but StyleBootstrap is a more detailed one with color pickers and the ability to style each component differently

• BootSwatchr

  – a Bootstrap theme roller that shows the immediate results of your changes. For every generated style, the application generates a unique URL in case you want to share it with others or return and edit anytime later.

• Bootswatch

  – a nice set of free themes for Bootstrap

Bootsnipp

This is a good collection of design elements and HTML snippets for Bootstrap. It offers also form and button builders.
LayoutIt – drag and drop interface builder based on the elements and components of Bootstrap.
It helps you to compose your design visually by placing and arranging different elements into your layout via drag and drop and then allows you to edit their properties.
You get the base code and then expand it. Simple and easy.

Fbootstrapp

Fbootstrapp is based on Bootstrap and gives you the same functionality for Facebook iframe apps and designs. It includes base CSS and HTML for all standard components like typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more, styled in the typical Facebook look and feel.

BootMetro

BootMetro is a framework inspired by the Metro UI CSS, which is built on top of Bootstrap, for creating Metro/Windows 8-styled websites. It includes all Bootstrap’s features plus some additional extras like tiled pages, an application bar, and more.

Kickstrap

Simply put, Kickstrap is a kind of Bootstrap on steroids. It uses Bootstrap as its base and extends it with many apps, themes and extras. This makes the framework a complete kit for building websites without the need to install anything. Just put it in your site and you are ready to go.