At the start of every web-based project, the requirements around the User Interface (UI) start to be discussed. What will the application look like, what CSS styles will it use, and how will our user interact with the system? The UI experience is all about ease of use, intuition, and simple workflow. As such, it can either make or break an otherwise good website. The focus on a good user interface experience (UX) means that many companies employ specialist teams to either design the UI for look and feel, or to design the UI experience, including workflow. Depending on the skills of the UX team, their output may be a set of images that show what the user experience should look like, or it may, in fact, be a set of HTML pages and CSS files.

There will come a time, however, where every developer needs to put together a UI, so understanding the process and working with tools that are designed for design is a necessary step of building applications. In this section of the chapter, we will work with Bootstrap as a base for CSS styling of our website, and also look at an editor named Brackets that is great for rapid HTML prototyping.