Overview

What is Foundation?

Foundation is one of the advanced front-end frameworks for designing beautiful responsive websites. It works on all types of devices and provides you with HTML, CSS and JavaScript plugins.

Foundation began as an internal style guide, built by ZURB in 2008. ZURB is a product design company in Campbell, California. It released Foundation 2.0 as open source in October 2011. The latest version of Foundation is 6.1.1, released in December 2015.

Why Use Foundation?

• It provides faster development by using Sass compiler, which works much faster than default compiler.
• It enriches your website with pricing tables, switches, joyride, range sliders, lightbox and many more.
• It comes with development package like Grunt and Libsass for faster coding and control.
• Foundation for sites provides you with HTML, CSS and JS to quickly build websites.
• Email framework provides you with responsive HTML emails, which can be read on any device.
• Foundation for Apps allows you to build fully responsive web apps.

Features

• It has powerful grid system and some useful UI components and cool JavaScript plugins.
• It provides responsive design, which serves all types of devices.
• It is optimized for mobile devices and truly supports mobile first approach.
• It provides HTML templates, which are customizable and extensible.

Advantages

• It is easy to learn, once you have the basic understanding of HTML and CSS.
• You can use Foundation freely as it is an open source.
• It provides you a bunch of templates, which helps you in start developing the website right away.
• Foundation supports preprocessors like SASS and Compass, which makes development faster.

Disadvantages

• Because of the popularity of the Twitter Bootstrap, the community support for Twitter Bootstrap is better than Foundation.
• It may take some time for beginners to learn and take advantage of the preprocessor support.
• Lack of wider support like QA sites and forums for fixing issues.
• Foundation has less themes compared to others.