The importance of a design template is twofold. For the developers, it’s easier and quicker to build a high-quality, responsive design without even getting into code. But there’s another upside to “cookie-cutter” tools—a familiar layout is a big advantage for a site’s design. CSS grid generators bring the best of both worlds! In this article, we’ll review why using CSS grid generators is worth it. We’ll address some of the supposed downsides of templating website designs and top it off with our top list of CSS grid generators.
Importance of Templates in Site-Building
Skeptics of grid generators often point towards the “sameness” of websites that are built on their foundation. However, a site looking similar to its competitors isn’t actually a bad thing at all! Research by Google shows that it’s quite the opposite: it’s important for a website not to be too different from others so that users can respond positively to it.
This is why it’s common for sites to look similar across many industries, from news and shops to online casinos. For online casinos, specifically, it’s important to invoke the feeling of familiarity with their layout right away. Many gambling sites look prototypically the same with their layouts to convey a sense of reliability. It makes sense: users wouldn’t trust their money on an unfamiliar, unproven casino. With how massive the online casino industry is, each gambling site has a very limited window to draw users in and convince them to stay. A clear, familiar design built via CSS grids is the best way to do it.
Why Use CSS Grid Generators
The concept of a CSS grid is one of the basic tenets of web design. It’s the “foundation” of the web page—before any type of feature development takes place, a designer usually creates a basic mockup. This mockup then defines the basic structure and look of the site. The CSS grid module divides the page into regions, helping developers definite positions, limits, sizes, etc., of the site’s elements without writing much code.
CSS grid generators take it a step further. These tools allow you to create grids automatically with an intuitive visual design. They are highly customizable and able to create visually coherent designs with cross-browser compatibility. Here’s a quick overview of why CSS grid designers are commonly used by beginners and veterans alike:
- Time-efficient: Web developers can skip the slog of manually writing CSS with quick visual design, making the development process take a fraction of what it’d take the old-school way.
- Error reduction: Using a tool to autogenerate lines of code removes the possibility of user error. Instead, spend that debugging time actually coding the features.
- Easy to learn: If you’re a newbie web developer, a CSS grid generator can help you learn the properties of the CSS grid in a visually intuitive way. There’s no better method to learn CSS syntax than just to observe the results!
Overall, CSS grid generators save time, reduce errors, and offer an intuitive way to learn and implement responsive web layouts, making them essential for both beginners and experienced developers.
Top CSS Grid Tools for Efficient Web Design
There’s a whole bunch of CSS grid generators out there. They all function similarly with the advantages we’ve listed above, along with some additional perks. Let’s take a quick peek at some of the best options that suit beginners and pros alike.
Griddy: An Open Source CSS Grid Generator
Griddy is an open-source tool for easy templating. Its main advantage is the ease of use: it features an intuitive toolset with immediate visual feedback. It’s possible to create the framework for the site using Griddy with minimal know-how in web development, so it’s pretty handy for beginners. It allows users to customize the grid structure with its drag-and-drop interface quickly and without much fuss.
That said, this simplicity does come with the drawback of limited options. For example, Griddy can only output CSS syntax—you can’t edit it in real time like with some other generators. The grid generator itself is also pretty lacking; for instance, you can’t edit the content on a per-element basis. Instead, all the customization must be applied to an entire row or column. The tool also doesn’t output any HTML, only CSS, which can be confusing for beginner web developers.
We still recommend Griddy as one of the best options for newbies. Even pros find it useful—it’s a good tool for quickly “sketching out” a website body before starting the hard part of the work.
Angry Tools: Web Dev Suite
Angry Tools features a whole suite of stuff to make a web developer’s life easier, but we’ll be focusing on its CSS Flex Generator tool here. Its main advantage over Griddy is additional customization, but it’s still easy to use. You can customize elements one by one, assign labels to keep track of stuff, inject additional styling CSS into elements, and so on.
The Flex Generator allows for more fine-tuning of deeper in-site components. Angry Tools outputs clean CSS code that is flexible and adjustable to screen size. The output window is also excellent, as it shows the true look of the resulting website without any markings, grids, or whatnot. Overall, Angry Tools is a step up from Griddy in terms of customization, yet it remains user-friendly. It’s not the most comprehensive grid generator per se, but it’s close enough.
CSS Grid Layout Generator
This tool with a very imaginative name is a massive step up in complexity. This Grid Layout generator is aimed at professionals. Unlike other tools, it requires some time (not that much, though) to learn how to use it properly, but the end result is worth it. It has some of the quickest customization options, such as drag-to-resize, and it even helps newbies learn with screencasts and YouTube guides provided by the developer.
CSS Grid Layout Generator is excellent for quickly prototyping layouts by “freehanding” them while still obtaining the necessary code. It outputs both HTML and CSS syntax, which makes it a valuable tool for learning both while seeing how they work in real time.
Summing Up
CSS grid generators are fantastic tools that simplify, speed up, and improve the process of creating a responsive design layout. They help beginners and experienced web developers streamline the development process by removing the possibility of human error and providing responsive, adaptive results. Since there’s a multitude of CSS generators available, it’s easy to pick out one that suits your preferences and project needs.