How to get started with Foundation 5

Zurb’s Foundation is one of the most widely-used responsive frameworks available at the minute — and for good reason, too. With a flexible grid system, a seemingly endless features-list and a community working to push new and improved features as often as possible, you can see why.

Not only that, but it’s full of scaffolding CSS to construct a wireframe model in no time at all — or even to use as part of your full-scale designs.

The latest version of Foundation — Foundation 5 — was released last week, so this is the perfect time to investigate its possibilities.

Today, we’ll go through the motions of creating a bicycle enthusiast’s website. We’ll learn how to:

• download and install the Foundation framework;
• insert content with the flexible, responsive grid system straight out of the box;
• create a “hero” panel to display featured text or images prominently;
• we’ll even add some buttons, a block grid and a navbar to complete our design.

So, if you follow along from beginning to end, you’ll have a fully responsive website in less than 20 minutes. Pretty impressive, if you ask me!

Do you use Foundation? What parts of it do you enjoy the most? Let us know in the comments.

WDD Staff

WDD staff are proud to be able to bring you this daily blog about web design and development. If there's something you think we should be talking about let us know @DesignerDepot.