Earlier this year my colleagues and I worked on a digital plan for the marketing department in order narrow down our focus in getting the projects done in a uniform matter. Part of my contribution to the plan was determining what tools could be used in the creation of our micro sites, landing pages, and full websites. Being that a majority of my time is spent doing front end web design, picking a framework that was robust and made it easy to create responsive websites was a number one priority of mine. While there were a bunch of options to choose from, the two major frameworks that (pretty much) lead the pack were Twitter's Bootstrap and Zurb's Foundation. I wasn't too pleased with the uniformity I saw with sites built with Bootstrap so ultimately chose Foundation for our development.
Things were great for a long while and I was able to take our designers mockups and transform them into functioning sites with little problem thanks to Foundations various plugins and easy grid system. The downside which ultimately hurt development was that the lack of support for older versions of Internet Explorer (primarily IE 8 which a lot of our customers use). Although usage of IE 8 is dwindling (http://theie8countdown.com/) we still needed to support it and this resulted in me using hacks and extra markup to get things to function.......barely. Fast forward to a couple of months ago.
I personally decided to ditch Foundation for Bootstrap, both for personal projects and work related sites. The sheer fact that it supports IE 8 was a huge plus for me and overriding their inherit styles out of the box was much easier than in Foundation. I was also pretty happy that it supports both LESS and SASS for writing style sheets (Foundation only supports SASS) and that the ecosystem for themes is HUGE! Overall, I'm pretty happy with Bootstrap and I've realized that the previous uniformity I saw was only skin deep and didn't take advantage of what was really possible. I'm looking forward to seeing how Bootstrap evolves!
