Bluefoot Blog

As the Lead Developer, it is my goal to continuously increase the efficiency of our development team, while increasing the quality of the finished product. I spend an hour of each day researching new trends and technologies for design and development, and the biggest improvement we’ve made lately is our switch to LESS over traditional CSS.

I recently reviewed and reorganized our HTML structuring, implementing a standard template, where we break down our pages into header, footer, and section tags, to help visually organize the structure, making it easier to locate a specific part of a page. We use the HTML5 header and footer tags to contain the repeating sections of each page, while we use section tags with classes describing each content area of the pages. This method provided the perfect transition into using LESS.

If you’re not familiar with LESS, it is a CSS pre-processor, allowing shortcuts and improved efficiency in reused code, which decreases development time. LESS works in a manner very similar to HTML, in that it allows for nested selectors. It also allows the use of variables for colors, fonts, etc, and even MIXINS, or reusable code shortcuts. Once you’ve mastered the power of LESS, it can shave HOURS off of your development time.

One blog post can’t describe the full power of LESS, so for more information on LESS, visit http://lesscss.org.