Because I took an introductory web design course, I decided to use CSS and JavaScript within the Bootstrap framework. That's what we learned. Our instructor mentioned PHP is good to use for reusing HTML snippets. In this site you see that with the navigation toolbar and the bottom technology image banner. However, the bottom banner is only visible on large screened devices. Here large is whatever screen dimensions Bootstrap deems as large.

Other possible tools to design this site include

• Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSPs) served by a servlet container, like Apache Tomcat
• Python using a framework like Django
• Perl using a framework, althought I don't know of any offhand.
• Ruby on Rails

Of course this list is nowhere near being exhaustive. And the tools listed above would probably use CSS and Bootstrap for cleaning up their output's display formats.

Servlets and JSPs seemed too complex for what I needed. They are used throughout the web, but I didn't need most of the servlet/JSP functionality. Templating HTML wouldn't be as straightforward as it is in a language designed to generate documents from templates such as PHP. Also, servlets need to be compiled, as compared to PHP scripts and the scripts for the other technologies above.

Like servlets and JSPs, technologies such as Python, Perl and Ruby aren't as well suited to template-based page generation as PHP is. Having had experience with Python and Perl before taking my intro to web developmemt, I did consider them before settling on PHP. But PHP is great for generating documents based on templates. Simply include the template php files via a <?php include ...?> directive in the outer PHP file, and the included PHP script is reused in a snap!

Aren't there similar frameworks to Bootstrap?

I believe so, but since I never learned about them, I stick to using Bootstrap.