The worst thing anyone wants to see when visiting a website is an ugly website. It’s bad for the brand, it’s bad for the user, it’s just an overall lose-lose situation for everyone. Even if the site is the most functional, efficient wbesite I’ve ever visited, if it looks like it’s a first-graders art project I will immediately turn away from the site. One website that I found is probably one of the most confusing ones I have ever seen. Ironically, according to their hideous website, they sell packages for web design and internet advertising. Unfortunately their website looks like it was designed 20 years ago (their name sounds like it was made 20 years ago too), uses about 10 different fonts on the home page alone (which from a graphic design standpoint makes the entire page look incohesive), and looks like it would give visitors a virus. I think my eyes got tired just looking at that page.
UI Frameworks play an important role in not making visitors go blind. I believe that Semantic UI, one of the bigger UI Frameworks, is actually quite helpful, it does more than just not send visitors to the hospital. In comparison to raw HTML and CSS, it actually makes much of the web design process incredibly easy. Similarly to a good IDE, it tends to do a lot of the work for the programmer and takes away a lot of the stress of having to play around with styling individual pixels, margins, padding, etc. while still allowing for a lot of control and creativity. This is especially true since the Semantic UI website gives template code for each of its different objects, making it extremely easy for anyone to pick up. Semantic UI in particular can be used to make some really beautiful websites, much nicer and much quicker than one would be able to using pure HTML and CSS.
While I will continue to praise Semantic UI for its ease of use and ability to create great websites, it does come with some challenge. A few tabs in my web browser are dedicated to having multiple pages open to the Semantic UI website in order to retrieve code regarding the absolutely ridiculous amount of customization options that are available as well as the syntax required to get things to work properly. While the amount of options there are for each menu, button, list, etc. do make things more complex and harder to find, they do allow for more creativity as programmers are able to make a very wide variety of different things. I don’t necessarily have anything bad to say about UI Frameworks as I believe they are a comepletely necessary tool for anyone looking to do any sort of web design, so you don’t end up wasting your money buying a web package from these people.