Bootstrap & Responsive Website Development

Continuous development of new mobile devices (with different screen sizes and resolutions) makes it apparently impossible to write custom code for creating a separate UI design for each of the new devices. Fortunately, a Responsive Web Design (RWD) can help address such needs. It is an approach that helps design websites and web apps that can be easily accessed across a wide variety of devices, while deploying a great user experience.

The biggest benefit of using RWD approach is that can help businesses curtail their development cost – that they otherwise would have spent on managing multiple websites. Besides, since the search engine giant (i.e. Google) recommends using a responsive design, not having one can make your business lose its relevance in SERPs (search engine result pages).

Twitter Bootstrap – An Overview

Twitter Bootstrap is one of the most popular front-end frameworks that was created by two Twitter employees: Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton. It helps in creating fluid and intuitive web design swiftly. Essentially, this front-end framework can scale your sites, as well as, web apps easily and quickly using just a single code base for all the devices.

The best part about Bootstrap is that it makes use of commonly used HTML, CSS and JavaScript web technologies for developing responsive and mobile-first designs. What’s more? It is an open-source collection of tools that helps take the pain out of web development projects.

Bootstrap is one of those open source offerings that the internet comes up with every once in a while that has the ability to please users across the board. Bootstrap is a front-end framework that lets anybody build a professional, responsive, good-looking and functional website in no time at all.

It provides with some great typography capabilities to play with, and, since it’s undergone several changes over the years, nearly everything that is build with it has a modern feel – from menus to navigation to checkboxes – all with minimum fuss and effort.

Fast Development

Twitter Bootstrap is an ideal choice for site owners who want to build websites or applications quickly. It provides great pre-made templates that can be used for building your responsive website. Just make a few changes to the style, add some images and a few design elements to your theme, and can make the theme go live.

It Provides Styles For HTML Elements

Thankfully, Bootstrap comes loaded with basic HTML elements that have already been styled and improved using extensible classes.

Below are a few HTML elements for which base styles have been provided by Bootstrap:

• Typography
• Images
• Icons
• Buttons
• Forms and more.
• Fluid Grid Layout

Bootstrap makes the process of creating responsive web design a breeze, as it is built on a responsive 12-column grid layout. Every column of the grid easily scales to the view-port width. Just by making a few changes, one can choose to have a fixed grid or responsive layout. In addition to this, Bootstrap helps in making the process of developing mobile-first designs a lot easier, as it saves from the hassle of having to alter your HTML document when designing for screen width of every new device.

The grid system is arguably the most important element of a front-end framework. Bootstrap’s grid system is highly responsive, flexible, and is now optimised for the production of mobile-first design. Bootstrap uses pixels for calculating widths, heights etc.

Makes Customization a Breeze

Bootstrap is fully customisable, meaning that only the sites which use the default settings should end up with a “Bootstrap look”. All of the CSS and JS behaviour can be overridden, though it has a very large variety of themes readily available, all of which offer something unique. So, even if starting with a theme, we can still customise it to something that’s different than anything else that’s out there.

Moreover, Bootstrap comes bundled with many useful JavaScript plugins that can be used to minify the size of files and so on.

Open Source

Anything that’s open source is quite frankly amazing and Bootstrap is no exception (and Foundation, too, to be fair). Hosted on Github, it is released under the MIT license, which means that we have complete freedom to experiment and change the framework however we wish, without having to deal with purchasing and licensing issues.

Browser Support

All modern major web browsers are compatible with Bootstrap. What is more, even if a user is accessing a Bootstrap site using a browser that predates html-5, the plugins HTML5Shiv and Respond.js come bundled in with the default template to overcome this.

Here is the list of few awesome websites built with Bootstrap:

http://www.hydearchitects.com/
http://cozar.me/
http://plazaclassic.com/
http://www.1bite2go.com/en/
http://www.madetogether.com.au/
http://www.sympathiediagnose.de/
http://www.montere.it/?lang=en
While Bootstrap is widely used CSS framework for creating responsive UI, there few others that can’t be ignored in the list:

Foundation

Foundation is another popular responsive front-end framework. With this modern HTML5 framework, we can approach web design either mobile first, or from big displays down to mobile sizes. It has rapid-prototyping capabilities, a responsive grid system and much more.
Foundation is by ZURB, a company of product designers focused on providing web-based solutions.

Skeleton

Skeleton is a simple and clean responsive CSS boilerplate for HTML5 websites and apps. It’s got just the things we need, and nothing more. Some notable features: a responsive layout grid, standard media queries for device-specific CSS style properties, a CSS class for responsive image elements that scale with the layout grid, a PSD template for mocking up web designs, and an HTML5 shiv for old web browsers.

HTML5 Boilerplate

In 2010, HTML5 Boilerplate became one of the first, and subsequently, most popular open source front-end web development tools for getting HTML5 websites and web apps up and running in no time. It’s a compilation web development solutions that enable our sites to support modern web browsers. Included in HTML5 Boilerplate is a mobile-friendly HTML template, placeholder icons, CSS resets for normalizing/standardizing stylesheet property values, standard media queries for popular viewing screens, an HTML5 shiv for non-modern web browsers, and more.

HTML KickStart

One of the newest kids on the block, HTML5 KickStart is a lean and mean package of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. At about 300KB, HTML KickStart packs quite a punch: UI components like stylish buttons and navigation bars, scalable icons (using Font Awesome), a responsive grid layout, a touch-enabled slideshow component and so on.

Montage HTML5 Framework

Montage is an open source HTML5 framework for building modern apps. This JavaScript library uses declarative binding which easily helps keep app data and UI in sync. Montage also has a feature called Blueprints for associatively binding metadata onto app objects — a pretty nifty function for dealing with lots of dynamic page elements.

SproutCore

SproutCore is a front-end framework for building HTML5 apps rapidly. It follows the MVC architecture pattern and promises its users the ability to craft native-like user experiences for the Web.

Zebra

Zebra is a rich UI open source framework that leverages HTML5 canvas as the backbone of its rendering abilities.

CreateJS

CreateJS is a suite of open source JavaScript libraries and tools for creating rich, interactive HTML5 content. It consists of 5 modular JavaScript libraries. Adobe, Microsoft, and AOL sponsor this project.

Less Framework

Less Framework is a modern front-end framework for building responsive designs. Similar to Skeleton (discussed above), Less Framework focuses on being just a plain and simple layout grid framework. It has 4 pre-built layouts: Default, Tablet, Mobile and Wide Mobile.