For a project at work I needed to standup a website that would become the basis of a suite of tools and turned to my old friend PHP. The initial scope was small so instead of using one of the many frameworks out there I wrote my own. The goal was to open source it – and I might still – because it was perfect for the small site yet was built on the MVC pattern. About the only features I included was the typical load helper, DB access, and error handling. The application ignited the imaginations of those using it and now it has morphed into something bigger. I have started refactoring the site to use the Zend Framework, but I also needed an admin area.

I am not a designer so one of the tasks that seems to drain my spirt is designing a layout. Don’t get me wrong. I am very opinionated about usability of a layout I just hate coding the layout. Then I stumbled on the Twitter Bootstrap project. If you have not seen this open source project from the Twitter team you really need to… especially if you are like me and hate building the UI. I won’t go into the particulars because U trust you can all read for yourself. The Bootstrap framework has some great documentation. It basically contains 90% of everything you would need for the majority of sites and is easy to use. Customization is not as easy, but as long as you understand CSS you should be fine.

So if you need a new layout for your site or application I suggest checking it out. If it isn’t perfect it will at least be a great spring board.