Introduction
When building a website, utilizing multiple different languages can be overwhelming. This is especially present when it comes to styling your website, with so many different HTML elements to style, you don’t know where to start. You can make this process seem less overwhelming and faster with the use of CSS frameworks
In this article I will explain what a CSS framework is and the benefits of utilizing a framework. Then I will dive deeper and show a step-by-step process of using one of the frameworks mentioned. At the end, you’ll be able to better understand the function and use cases of CSS frameworks and how to utilize them properly as well.
Defining a CSS framework
A CSS framework is a library of pre-made elements ready to implement for quick and consistent website styles and responsive layouts. Frameworks include pre-written and reusable code for styling different HTML elements like links, buttons, and forms. These are used to easily create consistency across your website and improve the user experience.
The Benefits of Utilizing a CSS Framework
You may be wondering why you should use a CSS framework. You know that you can style a website yourself through vanilla CSS, but that is why you should use a CSS framework. Every time you code in CSS you’re writing the same code numerous times for different websites. With a CSS framework however, you can write your code once and you’ll have the ability to use it everywhere, which eliminates redundancy.
Developers also use it for speed. CSS frameworks speed up development time because they come with an extensive library of pre-made elements out of the box. This is especially helpful because it easily creates a consistent design, saving you the headache of having to spend days or weeks trying to have every element be the same in terms of padding, color, and font sizes.
As a tool, CSS frameworks make it easier and faster to style websites. For users that visit a website, CSS frameworks combine both UI and UX which make websites easy to navigate and understand. Today, approximately 1 in every 4 websites on the internet are built with a CSS framework.
This feature of easy consistency will help your websites’ visitors in terms of navigation and ease of use. Another bonus is the fact that most popular CSS frameworks are widely used, allowing your website to feel familiar to users. This is great from a UX standpoint.
How did CSS frameworks become a widely used tool?
In 1994 Håkum Wium Lie created CSS, a new programming language used to style the familiar looking HTML webpages across the internet. Through the years as developers relied on CSS more and more, they started to realize that it wasn’t very efficient and that it took lots of time to style a webpage from scratch with CSS. In 2007, Blueprint CSS was developed as the first CSS framework and started the path towards modern day CSS frameworks.
Throughout the years more CSS frameworks began to popup, and were making developers’ lives much easier. I’ve included a timeline to show key points in the development of CSS frameworks.
Introduction to Bulma
So far, we’ve talked about what CSS frameworks are and why you should utilize frameworks in your projects. Now I want to introduce you to a lightweight and modern framework called Bulma. Bulma is great for beginners and easy to get started with.
To understand the basics of Bulma, I made a video showing you how to install and start utilizing Bulma in your projects.
Bulma is a great framework for beginners to get started with, but there are many other options that I haven’t talked about. There’s Tailwind, Bootstrap, and Materialize to name a few, but I won’t dive deeper into these frameworks in this blog post.
Conclusion
CSS frameworks are an amazing tool in modern web development, allowing developers to quickly style their webpages and have it look consistent throughout. They continue to evolve and become more and more powerful for a variety of developers.
Now that you know more about CSS frameworks, I encourage you to learn more about Bulma or another CSS framework. Explore the documentation or just experiment with it.
Sources
