Last updated - January 5, 2024
Digital opportunities have opened new doors for both large and small businesses today. And at the forefront of relationships with online customers is the user interface.
Digital businesses are on the rise today. With millions of websites and apps on the market, creating a product that appeals to the customers is essential. Every agency wants to attract the right customers, have product loyalists and improve traffic over time. To achieve these, developing innovative solutions is equally important as making them easy to use. Thus, the importance of front end development and frameworks can’t be overstated.
Good front ends facilitate clean, dynamic, and responsive websites and mobile apps. The user interface will be much easy to navigate, personalized to user demands, make tasks more manageable, and align with the best SEO standards, Thereby boosting the overall user experience. But without using the proper front end framework, the job might become complicated.
This article touches on the meaning of front end frameworks and the criteria for choosing the best ones.
What is a Front End Framework?
Front end frameworks are protocols written with a programming language to help develop user interfaces of websites and apps. These frameworks contain the essential tools on which developers can build their project-specific functionalities. Thus, they won’t have to scratch-code, which speeds development time, makes coding straightforward, and facilitate a faster app-to-market time.
The most popular front ends include React, Vue, Flutter, jQuery, and Angular, amongst many others. These frameworks contain basic development necessities, including code libraries, scripting languages, utility apps, integration tools, etc.
What to Consider when Choosing a Front End Framework
Here are some factors you should consider while deciding on your front end framework.
Popularity
Many things happen during code that may require external support. For example, your developers may be stuck halfway through the code, or you may need to change experts. But all these become easy only when using a popular front end framework.
A popular framework translates to a vast community base ready to help. That means you can always seek and get ready-made support during mobile app development. Plus, you can access a wide range of experts at competitive rates. So even when your developers abandon your work for whatever reasons, replacements become easy to find.
Framework popularity becomes even more critical post-development. With massive support, it gives your product long-term stability and reliability.
According to Stack Overflow statistics, React JS is the most popular front end framework by a large margin. Built on JavaScript, it has a vast community of developers. Others include Angular JS, Vue JS, Svelte, etc
Core Functionalities and Features
Tools such as state management, HTTP connectivity, form processing, request validation, and templates are indispensable to a well-functioning framework. Thus remember to check the availability and support provided for these features.
Meanwhile, your work goes beyond that. Every popular framework is feature rich until you narrow it down to your product’s requirements. Thus, to get a clearer view, analyze the framework’s features in the context of your website needs.
Get the framework documentation, read and examine its feature sets, compare it with other frameworks and make your decision.
Usability
Now you’ve chosen the framework that suits your project demands. What characteristics, ease of use, deficiencies, and potential drawbacks does it has? No familiarity with a framework makes you skeptical about its suitability for your project.
Of course, your decisions become easy if you have used such a framework for past development. But for a new software entrepreneur, you can get support from the community to gather insights. Or better still, employ experts from mobile app development companies to work on your project. Their experience on similar projects lets them determine what is usable and what is not.
Otherwise, get your hands dirty. Experiment with the framework on a smaller project. Explore its IDE, script, libraries, plug-ins, and CLIs, and familiarize yourself with the framework. Sometimes, it might require developing an MVP to determine which framework best suits your solution.
Responsiveness to Mobile Demand
It’s no secret that mobile device usage is on an unprecedented rise. Statista recorded that mobile devices generated 58.99% of global web traffic in the 2nd half of 2022. And the number of mobile users is forecasted to increase by 23% from 2022 to 2028.
Looking at the current trends, prioritizing your framework’s responsiveness to mobiles is a no-brainer. First, your framework must support websites and apps for mobiles. It must conform with the current mobile app trends, website responsive to different screen sizes, web applications, cross-platform development, etc.
At the baseline, your framework must ensure the proper delivery of your products to mobile users.
Server-side Rendering to Improve SEO
With mobile usage skyrocketing, it’s crucial to analyze the SSR capabilities of your website. Server Side Rendering involves turning web frameworks into HTML codes readable by Google Bots for display through the server rather than the browser.
SSR prevents website crawling and facilitates faster loading time, which invariably boosts your SEO rankings on Google.
Most popular frameworks now provide SSR functionalities. For example, React.js uses Next.js, Angular uses Angular Universal Tool, and Svelte uses Svelte Compiler.
Flexibility and Ease of Integration
When creating unique solutions, it’s always nice to have a dynamic and extensive library, ample room for experimentation, and integration tools to complement your website functions.
Thus, you must choose the most flexible framework, ready to serve your appetite for creativity. Most framework libraries provide rich-text editing, data processing, and DOM manipulation, amongst other functionalities.
Long-term Support After Development
Long-term support either ensures your product’s stability or jeopardizes it over time. Hence, you must be confident in the front end’s future scope for improvement. Analyze the framework’s support, maintenance, community, frequency of new upgrades, etc.
Choosing your Front End Framework
There are many frameworks today that you may not know which to choose. While some are for general purposes, others are used for specific functions.
For instance, React.js and Angular are functional for building websites and software front ends. Anime.js lets you add animation to your site, while Chart.js is applicable for charts and graphs. So, each framework works in different conditions.
But your decisions are when you have experts around to guide you. Mobile app development is tedious. But professionals can guide you by providing helpful advice and handling the whole development work and in such cases, mobile app development firms might offer effective solutions as they possess the technical skills and expertise.
