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One way to ensure your designs are usable is to remove the guesswork and rely on code and best practices that are tried and true. That's why many designers and developers build sites using frameworks.
[Dan Gorgone] One way to ensure that your designs are usable is to remove the guess work
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and rely on code and best practices that are tried and true.
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You may understand that providing clean markup and efficient code that search engine robots view is the way to go,
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but you may not be completely sure how to make it all happen.
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Reinventing the wheel opens yourself up to new mistakes and issues,
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and that's why many designers and developers builds sites using frameworks.
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So a front-end framework or CSS framework is a collection or a library
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of these reusable snippets of code, DZY patterns, or components
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that designers and developers can use to sort to have as that structure for their design.
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A lot of the time is like that scaffold thing that you just kind to throw your design on top of,
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and it really speeds up your workflow because there has a lot of these best practices already baked in,
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and it's been battle tested by some of the industries top developers.
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So I kind of think of it as having your code QAed, revised, and tested and supported by some of these top developers.
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So rather than redoing a lot of work that has already been done and trying to solve problems that have been solved,
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designers can integrate their favorite pieces of code, tools, and libraries into a framework
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containing reusable components that they can reference when they begin working on a new project.
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A CSS framework leads to better usability for the user because a lot of the UI patterns that are used
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are already patterns that people who are out there are using.
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So it's an obstruction of that and they are gathering into this library of these reusable patterns
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where developers can sort just plug them in whenever necessary.
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And a lot of the times, well, in fact, all of the code has been tested for browser compatibility.
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For more information on frameworks, check out some of the more popular ones like the Miller grid system or Toast
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and more advanced ones like Bootstrap and Foundation.
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There are also mobile design frameworks like jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch,
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and each one of these has it's own strengths so be sure to check to them out.
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The hope is that using a framework will improve the usability of your site through the use of clean and efficient code,
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great design technique, and best practices
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and potentially having a whole community out there to advise you on the best way to use it.
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