Website Creation's Roller Coaster

08 Oct 2020

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The past couple of weeks, we’ve been learning how to create websites using HTML and CSS. At first, it seemed like something that could be easily done by anyone. A couple lines of code and I could create a tan-colored page with a history of browsers like Chrome or FireFox. When Semantic UI got introduced, it seemed like a very interesting framework that can be used to simplify designing websites. Although it can create nice margins and makes the page look clean with even just a few classes, I personally find it confusing and frustrating to use.

The Benefits of Learning Semantic

I’m not trying to say that not learning Semantic UI isn’t ideal. There are many benefits to it. For example, instead of trying to create page margins for your text, you can wrap the text in the “ui container” classes and Semantic will take care of it for you. Creating buttons and dropdown lists have never been easier either. You can simply put the “ui button” classes followed by the text and you’ll have a button, or you can use the “ui dropdown” followed by what you can in the dropdown list and voila, a dropdown menu appears. Need icons? All you really need to know is what kind of icon you’re looking for - put that as your classes and you have an icon that you could also recolor. You don’t have to provide any links to icons you found online since Semantic can take care of it for you.

The Confusion

I was able to do those stated above after experimenting with it, but it took me quite a while to understand it. The grids, containers and aligning of various items confuse me a lot. I always find myself having to look up what I can do with Semantic’s classes grids and what I can put in it. I remember myself being very confused because I thought “middle aligned” would center my text, but it wasn’t. I spent a lot of time searching up what I did wrong and how to do it properly, only to find out that for some reason, “center aligned” worked instead. In the end, I can’t say I dislike Semantic UI. It helps a lot with making my page designs look good while being formatted nicely. I hope to get more accustomed to using Semantic so that eventually, I’ll be happier than I was frustrated when I first started using it.