CSS Frameworks that Make Web Development Easier

CSS frameworks can make developing a site much easier, as they provide a backbone and infrastructure for a large amount of code, and they also give guidelines on design elements and number of columns.  While you’ll still have to write your own code for styling and making a site complete, frameworks allow you to develop a streamlined workflow and avoid rewriting tedious code over and over.

There are quite a number of free CSS frameworks that can make your life easier, and each has its own unique set of features and approach to web development.  In this post, we’ll examine some of the most popular and powerful CSS frameworks.

If you are looking for more web development tools, check out these posts:

• 10 Productivity Enhancing CSS and CSS3 Tools and Generators
• 20 Shockingly Cool HTML5 Canvas Applications
• Fresh and Useful HTML Tutorials
• The Ultimate HTML5 Toolbox
• Way Cool CSS3 Typography Experiments
• 30 Awesome jQuery Navigation Menu Tutorials + Plugins
• 10 Awesome CSS3 Techniques You’ll Want to Start Using
• The Ultimate CSS3 Toolbox
• 10 Best CSS and Web Typography Font Tools

Enjoy!

Blueprint

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

Elastic CSS

A simple css framework to layout web-based interfaces, based on the printed layout techniques of 4 columns but with capabilities to unlimited column combinations. and capacity to make elastic, fixed and liquid layout easily.

Tiny Fluid Grid

The happy & awesome way to build fluid grid based websites. Inspired by 1kbgrid.com. Developed with love by Girlfriend‘s overconfident and pretty good looking team of web developers. Tiny Fluid Grid ships with a index.html with demo code, and the grid.css containing the CSS for the grid you created.

52Framework

The 52 Framework is a new, and very much under construction, framework built specifically for utilizing HTML5 and CSS3 in a cross-browser, standards-compliant manner.

YAML

“Yet Another Multicolumn Layout” (YAML) is an (X)HTML/CSS framework for creating modern and flexible floated layouts. The structure is extremely versatile in its programming and absolutely accessible for end users.

YUI Grids

The foundational YUI Grids CSS offers four preset page widths, six preset templates, and the ability to stack and nest subdivided regions of two, three, or four columns. The 4kb file provides over 1000 page layout combinations.

960.gs

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.