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Bootstrap

Also known as
Twitter Bootstrap
Pronounced
BOOT-strap

Bootstrap is the most widely used CSS framework for building responsive websites.

It is a set of ready-made CSS files you attach to your site to make it “mobile” quickly and reliably — that is, to make it display correctly on phones and tablets.

At the heart of Bootstrap is a 12-column grid that rearranges itself depending on the width of the visitor’s screen.

On top of the grid, Bootstrap ships styling for most of the elements a modern site needs: buttons, forms, modal windows, navigation bars and so on.

Bootstrap is not the only way to build a responsive layout. There are alternatives such as Foundation, and it is perfectly possible to do the whole thing by hand with media queries. That takes considerably longer, but it is a legitimate choice.

The real advantage of Bootstrap is how common it is. It has been in use for so long and on so many sites that you can be reasonably confident the awkward corners of browser and operating-system compatibility have already been found and fixed by somebody else.