Is a framework always necessary?

delta_bravo

Hi,

Hoping to get some advice on this. I'm a recent cs conversion graduate and I have bought a hosted domain from spiral hosting with the intention of creating a simple personal website with my info and links to github and what projects I've done etc.

As part of the work I did on the course we looked at the web app side of web frameworks and the likes of laravel and symfony. I was thinking about using these on my site to get experience with them but my site is going to be almost entirely static content, zero databases and they seemed to be more geared towards dynamic sites. I'm just wondering would I be better off just using something like bootstrap for my site and then try get experience on using the other frameworks with a more dynamic site that I could fully utilise the frameworks on?

Thanks

KonFusion

delta_bravo wrote: »

I'm just wondering would I be better off just using something like bootstrap for my site and then try get experience on using the other frameworks with a more dynamic site that I could fully utilise the frameworks on?

Yep.

Unless all you want to learn is how to install Laravel and do some simple routing :pac:

Remember to apply your own styles if you go the bootstrap route. Not that it matters I guess, but personally I hate seeing sites where they author has just used the default bootstrap styles/theme.

m0rt

Have to agree with Zeldman on Bootstrap here:

As to frameworks like Bootstrap, they’re great if prototyping is part of your team’s design process—and in the world of apps, it surely should be. Such frameworks make it very easy to quickly launch a working design and test it on real human beings. But after a few iterations have improved your design, it’s time to dump Boostrap and code from scratch.

That’s because launching sites and applications based on Bootstrap or any other heavy framework is like using Microsoft Word to send a text message.

http://www.commarts.com/column/has-design-become-too-hard

Graham

m0rt wrote: »

Have to agree with Zeldman on Bootstrap here:



http://www.commarts.com/column/has-design-become-too-hard

In some parallel utopian world that might work. In the real world I wouldn't really want to be paying a web developer to reinvent responsive columns, tables etc etc etc...

m0rt

Graham wrote: »

In some parallel utopian world that might work. In the real world I wouldn't really want to be paying a web developer to reinvent responsive columns, tables etc etc etc...

Any good developer will reuse code snippets efficiently so there's no reinventing necessary. Bootstrap is bloated, inefficient and complete overkill for websites.

Graham

m0rt wrote: »

Any good developer will reuse code snippets efficiently so there's no reinventing necessary. Bootstrap is bloated, inefficient and complete overkill for websites.

Alternatively you find a good developer that can work with with less so the unused bootstrap elements aren't included. No wheel reinvention required.

I don't doubt a great designer can achieve great results and save a few bytes unfortunately there's not many of them about, it's not necessarily quicker and some poor bugger has to come and maintain their non-standard framework snippets in the future.

For most commercial projects writing in a framework then throwing everything away to write a custom version of the same thing is laughably unrealistic.

m0rt

Graham wrote: »

Alternatively you find a good developer that can work with with less so the unused bootstrap elements aren't included. No wheel reinvention required.

No issues with that but more often than not I've seen Bootstrap used inefficiently with an additional few thousand lines of code just to override the Bootstrap defaults. Then the actual styles on top of that. Madness. It's not the tool I have an issue with, it's the misuse of it.

Graham wrote: »

I don't doubt a great designer can achieve great results and save a few bytes unfortunately there's not many of them about, it's not necessarily quicker and some poor bugger has to come and maintain their non-standard framework snippets in the future.

HTML and CSS have standards of their own. Bootstrap isn't really a standard. There are hundreds of frameworks, grid systems, preprocessers that each have their own intricacies. Knowing the underlying languages makes a developer much more flexible and able to maintain code and write code that can be maintained.

Graham wrote: »

For most commercial projects writing in a framework then throwing everything away to write a custom version of the same thing is laughably unrealistic.

Sorry but that's just not true. Frameworks like Bootstrap are useful for rapid prototyping for early user feedback. But to include all the bloat that comes with them would often be detrimental to the final product. Especially on high traffic sites where every line of code must be justified. Page speed as a search ranking factor is another consideration. And load times on poor 3G connections.