UI Frameworks is something that most people starting out with web development don’t really think about/hear about. What’s so great about them and what are they? To give you a quick rundown, they make your life easier and make your time spent coding much more efficient.
I’ve used Bootstrap before so I knew what I was getting into when we started learning about Semantic UI. Not only is it easy to use but it has beautiful designs and built in classes that just make quality of life for the web developer so much better. Built in icons, columns, containers, the list can go on and on. It’s so important now to learn about UI frameworks, whether that’s Bootstrap, Meteor, Semantic, etc. You can’t find a single employer these days that doesn’t use some kind of framework. Why? Well because it’s much easier to have consistency across platforms, easier to outline coding standards, and it causes higher efficiency in time and effort. Any kind of UI Framework is beneficial to us as a whole, from having customizeable content at our fingertips to having easy to use features built in. Not only can you learn by trying to implement your own website but it’s also really easy to try to copy other websites (to learn how to properly style websites UI wise). Even if a site isn’t built on a specific framework, it is pretty easy to try to reimplement it in whatever framework you are using. It is a really great learning tool that teaches you not only how to use the framework, but also how to properly use the layout tools provided in the framework to get the content that you want.
Sure, you could technically use normal HTML and CSS to style sites how you want, but the amount of time and effort being used vs the amount of time and effort it takes with a framework is vastly different. Help yourself and learn a framework. Chances are that if you can use and learn one framework that learning another one is probably pretty easy too. Frameworks are probably the biggest tool in a web developers belt (as far as front end goes) and everyone should be utilizing them to their full potential not only to help your own life but to also help clients in the future.