The Makeup for a website
10 Oct 2019
Even Websites need makeup sometimes
Aren't you sick of a boring plain HTML website, well Semantic UI is here to save the day? Semantic UI is much like makeup in the way that helps to make plain old boring HTML website to something beautiful and presentable (I am not saying that there aren't any people who look beautiful and presentable without makeup just in case if I offended anyone then I am truly sorry). I am just going to throw this out there, but I really hated learning Semantic UI at the start, I felt that it was extremely complicated and stressful especially when things inside a container can sometimes go outside of a container (How does that even work?). Semantic UI was very confusing and stressful at first especially when we learned in around a week when there is so much information to be absorbed but after some practicing, I actually enjoyed Semantic UI and is glad how much easier it makes thing when I realized how hard it would be to create all those user interfaces just using HTML and CSS.
What is Semantic UI?
Semantic UI is a CSS framework, it's basically a library of pre-written CSS classes that helps to make your life easier, the main attraction of Semantic UI is in its name, this framework utilize using the semantics of the english language, so if you want to make a menu bar you can just type the css class as "ui menu" a class name that is simple and easy to understand. Unfortunately, due to it having a small community of users, it's sometimes hard to find solution to your problem online, for example if you look up Sematic UI on Stack Overflow, there is around 500 results compared to the 96,279 results found if you were to search for Twitter Bootstrap, a more popular UI framework, but I believe as Semantic UI improves its framework, that it will one day become a really popular framework because of how easy it would be for people to inspect each other webpages due to the semantic syntax that Semantic UI brings.
It takes time to learn how to put on makeup
After learning Semantic UI from Pluralsight, I was shown what amazing website I could build using Semantic UI and so I was excited to starting building some beautiful website but when I first attempted the Island Snow WOD, I was unable to finish in the given time, maybe it was because I was a perfectionist, after being shown what Semantic UI could do, I thought I would be able to make a website that looks exactly the same as the real website but building website is not that easy. I think building a website using Semantic UI is just like makeup, you want to look beautiful so you buy all the makeup you want, watch a bunch of youtube tutorials, but in the end, if you don’t actually practice putting on makeup, you will never be good it because makeup is not just one simple layer, you need to put on primer, foundation, mascara, eye shadow, and many other things that I don't even know about and all those things need to work in harmony to make you look good, surprisingly, using Semantic UI is just like that, I can know all about containers, buttons, menu and etc. but if I don’t practice using them together in harmony I will never truly be good at making a website.
Slowly getting better
Although learning Semantic UI was challenging at first, after some practicing by completing the Island Snow and Your choice WOD, I am slowly becoming better at creating a website and hopefully I will continue getting better, and I am glad that this was the framework that we chose to learn because I think that the simple syntax that it offers really helped to make the learning experience easier and more enjoyable.
Update (As of 12/18/29)
After finishing ICS 314, I feel that I now have a solid foundation on the usage of the Semantic Ui framework and now hope to start exploring other web UI framework such as TwitterBootstrap.