Corporate Websites - Front-End Techniques and Frameworks

Last week we delivered another responsive (corporate) website to a client of ours. We have at least a few such deliveries every month and most of the time such a project is followed by a retrospective meeting with the team who built the website. Both front-end and back-end teams participate in these meetings.

During the last few project retrospective meetings we have gathered front-end techniques and frameworks that work the best for us in terms of productivity of our front-end team and the quality of their deliverables. I thought other teams might find it useful as well and have decided to write this article and summarize what frameworks and tools we use on our projects when it comes to front-end development.

For the front-end work we use the following:

• HTML5
• Modernizr to cover browsers without support for HTML5
• CSS3 with fallback for non-modern browsers
• Compass and Sass (http://compass-style.org/) for cleaner markup, nested CSS rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance and more
• CSS media queries to define different views of our responsive websites (usually mobile, tablet and desktop) and to properly layout and style elements of different views
• RequireJS for files and modules loading
• KnockoutJS to simplify dynamic and complex JavaScript UIs using the Model-View-View Model pattern
• jQuery - for animated transitions and similar animation based UI effects

The tools that we use the most are:

• SublimeText2
• Adobe Photoshop
• Microsoft VisualStudio
• Google Chrome's Developer tools

What are the frameworks and tools that you use the most? Why would you choose them instead of those listed above?

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