Think about the last couple of years when there were not many technical advancements for front-end developers. One had to code hundreds of lines of CSS just to come up with a single website skeleton. Also, don’t forget the time spent in making separate layouts for different screen sizes and devices. Not only this, fixing a simple cross-browser compatibility issue used to take hours.

But today everything has been simplified with the advent of CSS frameworks, Using HTML and CSS frameworks you can easily accelerate your web design and development works.

Good front-end design frameworks are a real time saver as they provide you with the tools help to build a website from scratch. These frameworks are rich in features in terms of improving overall functionality and performance of a website or application. Today there are already many popular CSS and HTML frameworks to use but in this article, we are going to discuss only the 5 best frameworks that come free and are effective for your web development and designing works. But first let’s discuss what is a CSS Framework:

What is a CSS Framework?

A CSS framework provides a basic structure for designing a consistent solution for your business projects. They are a group of generic functionalities that can be overridden for your specific scenarios and applications. With a Framework you don’t need to create a website from scratch every time, you can simply use the basic foundation from an already developed website or application and can get straight with the development of main functionality of the project. Hence they greatly save your time rather than coding every little detail again and again for every new project you have on board. Here are 5 CSS frameworks that serve your need at the best.

Twitter Bootstrap:

Bootstrap is by far the most popular HTML, CSS and JS Framework available on the Internet. Millions of amazing websites across the web are designed using this framework and providing ultimate flexible and scalable opportunities. It comes with a responsive, mobile first fluid layout that easily scales up to 12 columns as the device or viewport size maximizes. Numerous components like Modals, DropDown, ScrollSpy, Tab, Tooltips, Popovers and Carousels are also a part of this framework.

Foundation:

If you are looking for the most responsive, lightweight and scalable framework around the web then this framework is for you. This mobile-first flexible framework has 12 column grid, customizable control handles and pre-built layouts. Hence you don’t need to create a lot of custom elements to build a complicated layout.

Semantic UI Framework:

As the name suggests, Semantic UI Framework is aimed to make website building process more semantic.It utilizes natural language principles to make the code more readable and easier to understand. One more thing that is good about semantic UI is that it has a well-organized documentation and a website with guides.

Gumby:

This Framework is powered by CSS Preprocessor that allows you to build and customize design in a faster fashion. It also comes with a 12 grid layout system that divides up the browser into 12 grids and supports nested gridding. This framework is also available for Internet Explorer 8 along with all the open source modern browsers.

UIKit by YOOtheme:

This framework is a collection of various easy-to-use and easy-to-customize components. It can be successfully used in many WordPress Themes. A flexible and powerful manual customization mechanism is what that makes this framework a strong competitor of others.

There are countless frameworks around the web each having their own philosophy and noteworthy unique features. Here we have quoted some of the most famous ones. Hope our small endeavour helped you a lot.