Lately, I have grown TIRED of building awesome back-end frameworks and web services only to end up bound by average and inconsistent web UI design that makes our beautiful back end work look like a PIG! I have found some GREAT tools and resources that will assure that even under time pressure without a super experienced web design guru, we can produce stunning web interfaces that reflect the quality we want:
- Twitter Bootstrap–Twitter’s great web design CSS and JavaScript framework built for social networking type sites. Awesome.
- Zurb Foundation–Web UI framework based on CSS and JavaScript that touts its responsive capabilities across multiple devices.
- HTML5 Boilerplate–Helps you build fast, robust, HTML5 compliant web sites based on a template.
- BootTheme.com–The most awesome web design tool I have come across, allowing the generation of complete web interface patterns customized for your particular use based on Twitter Bootstrap.
- Initializr–A template engine that will generate a site based on HTML5 Boilerplate AND, if you wish, a combination of HTML5 Boilerplate and Twitter Bootstrap!
- Great article comparing web design frameworks–This article provides a very practical example of using the two most dominant web UI frameworks on a common task, with a comparison of attributes (size, performance, and features).
I will endeavor to learn about all these frameworks and build a base Orchard theme for each, contributing those efforts back to the open source community, so never again are we bound by limitations in this area.
