Starting out in my development career, i am interested to hear from those who work in the web industry. What is better using frameworks or raw coding?

I never use frameworks as they are generally too bloated and include a ton of stuff that often never gets used. Granted some frameworks you can strip out what you don't need, but even so unless you want to use their generic grids etc it all takes time to tweak. That's why I always write my own to keep it as bloat free as possible, certainly on many custom projects every kb saved helps.

 

That said if a framework works for a particular site then use one, but I'd always advocate actually learning how CSS works first.

I also prefer writing my own CSS and if your new to development I would suggest writing your own CSS and HTML from scratch as you will learn a lot more from it.

 

But with that said I do us a framework from time to time. I use it when I am playing with PHP or angular because it allows me to focus on the function of what I am doing and not spending too much time on styles and HTML. I also use it when I want to get started on building backend when the designs are not ready yet. It allows me to get everything working and when the designs are ready I only need to reskin it.

 

More on what BlueDreamer said, I built a site with a framework and the total minified size was 91kb, this made me unhappy so I built it over from scratch and I managed to reduce the weight to 49kb which is a big saving.

For learning code from scratch. Frameworks speed up development time considerably, but many are designed more for rapid prototyping and contain a lot of bloat. We've built our own framework that is loosely based on Bootstrap.

There is no one size fits all though, learn how to code from scratch then find a framework that suits your development needs and patterns and if needed you can build your own, A developer who codes from scratch every time is really not using their time effectively.

personally from my experience i started of learning html css php mysql javascript jquery , when the time came to look for a job all the local companies at the time were looking for MVC frame work experience, if you are looking for a job then take a look at the companies that you would like to work for see what experience they are asking for. In Staffordshire a lot of companies are asking in for Laravel 4 experience

Thanks for this everyone all your advice has been taken on board. It seems at the moment where i live anyway alot of the jobs are all asking for HTML CSS skills for front end developers but alot of companies are just using frameworks. Laravel is massive and a big must amonst companies too it seems. As a student i have the chance to shape my path and i thnk i will do both to cover myself, as in 3 years the web will have changed direction again. Whats hot now may not be in years to come.

The only framework I have worked with is skeleton, I thought it was ok but the annoying thing is that it has loads of defaults styles for stuff like ul ect. I found it annoying going through and deleting all the stuff I didn't want. I recently started coding my portfolio and decided not to use a framework and I find it so much better. I didn't find it hard at all and It gives me more freedom.

Yeah, don't like frameworks