Design Frameworks

[Dan Gorgone] One way to ensure that your designs are usable is to remove the guess work 0:00 and rely on code and best practices that are tried and true. 0:04 You may understand that providing clean markup and efficient code that search engine robots view is the way to go, 0:09 but you may not be completely sure how to make it all happen. 0:16 Reinventing the wheel opens yourself up to new mistakes and issues, 0:19 and that's why many designers and developers builds sites using frameworks. 0:23 So a front-end framework or CSS framework is a collection or a library 0:28 of these reusable snippets of code, DZY patterns, or components 0:34 that designers and developers can use to sort to have as that structure for their design. 0:40 A lot of the time is like that scaffold thing that you just kind to throw your design on top of, 0:47 and it really speeds up your workflow because there has a lot of these best practices already baked in, 0:52 and it's been battle tested by some of the industries top developers. 0:58 So I kind of think of it as having your code QAed, revised, and tested and supported by some of these top developers. 1:02 So rather than redoing a lot of work that has already been done and trying to solve problems that have been solved, 1:11 designers can integrate their favorite pieces of code, tools, and libraries into a framework 1:17 containing reusable components that they can reference when they begin working on a new project. 1:23 A CSS framework leads to better usability for the user because a lot of the UI patterns that are used 1:29 are already patterns that people who are out there are using. 1:37 So it's an obstruction of that and they are gathering into this library of these reusable patterns 1:40 where developers can sort just plug them in whenever necessary. 1:46 And a lot of the times, well, in fact, all of the code has been tested for browser compatibility. 1:51 For more information on frameworks, check out some of the more popular ones like the Miller grid system or Toast 1:57 and more advanced ones like Bootstrap and Foundation. 2:04 There are also mobile design frameworks like jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch, 2:08 and each one of these has it's own strengths so be sure to check to them out. 2:13 The hope is that using a framework will improve the usability of your site through the use of clean and efficient code, 2:17 great design technique, and best practices 2:25 and potentially having a whole community out there to advise you on the best way to use it. 2:28