The HTML5 Designer from Infragistics

DevToolsGuy / Tuesday, March 3, 2015

As web pages are accessed from ever more diverse devices and pages include increasingly complex elements, developers are faced with more and more complex challenges in their builds. At the same time, clients expect work to be completed sooner and to tighter deadlines. Long gone are the days of plain text pages; users expect interaction, sharp visuals and speed.

Many projects are restricted by strict deadlines, tight budgets and so developers must do more in less time. Coding entire pages from scratch is still a common task and requires intense concentration, not to mention the need for support and guidance when lost. Developers are called on to carry out more complex tasks than ever and handling these competing pressures when building for the modern web takes an enormous amount of skill and know-how.

Given these complexities, a tool like Infragistics’ HTML5 Designer offers a powerful tool for developers to facilitate the process of building for the modern web. The in-browser designer includes toolkits choc-full of modern web components and drag-n-drop page design tools to make web design a breeze. We’ll look at some of these features in more detail below.

What is the HTML5 Designer?

While it’s able to do many things, the main focus of the HTML5 Designer is to simplify the process of building modern web pages for practically any line-of-business app or page. Drawing on over twenty five years of experience in designing business oriented components, we’ve thought in depth about how to make writing modern web pages easier than ever. The HTML5 Designer incorporates responsive design elements, Bootstrap grid layout support, Bootstrap theme support, modern page layouts, drag n drop sections, a great range of components, graphs and visualizations and allows users to configure different UI Controls.

These various capabilities mean that designers can do far more when building pages and do so more quickly. With components pre-built and the flexibility for easy coding and modification, making stunning, interactive web pages with a great UX is easier than ever. Some of the HTML5 Designer’s stand out features include:

WYSIWYG design

The Ignite UI designer allows developers to drag n drop a wide variety of User Interface elements (text box, title, image box etc.) onto their pages and also allows the incorporation of Infragistics’ controls (graphs, charts, pivot tables etc.). It becomes possible to render web pages quickly and efficiently and really make the most of the power HTML5 offers. These drag n drop interfaces are of course customizable and the designer allows developers to add or change code as their builds require.

Responsive web design made easy

As consumers and colleagues access web pages from thousands of different devices and screen sizes, the need to build more responsive web pages is more important than ever. The Smartphone has revolutionized our way of interacting with the internet and added another layer of complexity to the developer’s job.

In response to this, the HTML5 designer includes a number of features which ensure your builds will fit to different screen sizes more intelligently. Included with our designer is a built-in Bootstrap row component which easily leverages Bootstrap grid frameworks to your page. Developers can also make use of the CSS breakpoint visualizer and editor to see and edit their responsive designs and make sure they look as intended.

Drag-n-drop HTML5 Components from the toolbox

At Infragistics’ we pride ourselves on the quality of our controls and components for line-of-business users. Our tools make almost any data visualization you could want possible - from financial forecasts to interactive tables and OLAP charts. End users need to simply feed in the data and our tools represent the information with inspiring and engaging visuals.

The HTML5 Designer provides developers with over fifty charts which are perfectly orientated towards business needs. So, whether your company or client want to plan for the future, see automatically updating reports on their home pages or display data to customers, the vast array of components in the toolbox make sharing information easy and efficient.Integrated code helper

Thanks to its drag n drop technique, the HTML5 designer lets developer cut out a lot of time spent writing code and spend more time making a build beautiful. Nonetheless writing code will still be necessary and the integrated code helper makes this very easy and painless. Used by services as diverse as GitHub and Wikipedia, we incorporated and customized the ACE code editor and added specialized code completion capabilities. By simply hovering your cursor over code you can find links to relevant API documents which help you ensure you’re getting things right.

Make modern web design easier than ever

Web developers face an ever increasing set of challenges when building for the modern web. Clients and customers have higher expectations and developers must make use of an enormous and diverse range of skills and knowledge to succeed. A platform like Infragistics’ HTML5 designer is powerful here and means that developers can do more, faster. Put simply, advanced web development just got a whole lot easier.