Download: Foundation 3

Foundation 3 is a bit more technical than most of the downloads we review but bear with us because a little bit of technical perserverance upfront will reap big rewards later. Foundation is what's known as a framework for websites. It includes a comprehensive range of web site functions that are rather tricky to create from scratch. Not only do they arrive fully formed in the Foundation download but they are very easy to add to your websites.

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The Grid part of foundation helps with organising the content on your website. Although they might seem like the obvious solution (especially if you are used to Word or Excel), tables are no longer acceptable for web design. This can make life difficult but Foundation offers an easier way of creating some quite complicated layouts and the code used for this is easier to understand than many web tools we have used.

Foundation can also be used to create the navigation menus for your website. It creates the menus from appropriately marked lists and these can be nested to include sub menus. We were impressed to see that these sub menus can be several columns wide or even include pictures. The results of the latter option almost look like contained web pages themselves.

The fonts used for different headings are all relative to a starting size so you'll never have the problem of ordinary text appearing larger than headings. There are also some settings for quickly adjusting pages for printing such as removing page backgrounds.

There is a carousel tool for presenting a series of images. This can be used as a sideshow or can be very effective for highlighting special content on your website, as we do on this website. Just like the navigation menus, the carouse sells are created with simple lists marked in a certain way.

There are actually three ways of downloading foundation and you'll see the choice when you click on the download now button. You can either download foundation with the basic defaults, set up some basic customisation options or download the full version. We opted for the first option working on the basis that with a basic knowledge of the three web site languages (HTML, JavaScript and CSS) would be enough to change options as we went along.

The download is a compressed folder that contains three folders to add to your website, the images, CSS and JavaScript files used by foundation. These an be used as part of a 'static' site, one created with software on a computer and uploaded when changes are made, or 'dynamic' as part of a Content Management System or CMS. Examples of CMSs include Drupal and Wordpress. We used Foundation as part of a template for a website using the GetSimple CMS.