Designing with Style and Class

22 Feb 2018

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Making a functional website is easy. Making an aesthetically pleasing and functional website is difficult.

Turning an idea into an actual design can be challenging and may require frequent checkpoints to make sure recent changes do not mess up any previous formatting. Stylesheets can quickly become overcrowded with classes and there can be overlap between properties in the individual classes as well. Many of the issues encountered when designing a site using raw HTML and CSS can be avoided by using a UI framework.

My experience using the UI framework Semantic UI has been a positive one. One benefit I’ve noticed is that using Semantic UI makes the HTML files more readable due to the accurately descriptive class names. This also means that writing the code is easier because the classes are intuitive. For example, if you want something to be big, you can add the “big” class to your element. By using Semantic UI, building projects generally takes less time and it’s easier to reuse code. Using a more popular UI framework also means that there are more resources available online along with more expert web developers using the framework who can help you solve common styling problems.

Despite the many benefits that come with using a UI framework, some cons are that they are more limited and restrictive than raw CSS and it usually takes time to learn the syntax since it can be like learning a whole new language. Overall, however, I find UI frameworks to be worth using.