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Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?

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Re: Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?

#22
I struggled with this a lot, and was never satisfied, until I spent a few weeks doing CSS & flexbox lessons from Lynda.com (free from my library).

Now I can get mostly where I want to go without frameworks and it is very empowering. It's just another language, it's not that tough.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?

#25
post #15

I always end up back at bootstrap, and eventually am pretty happy with it... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://getbootstrap.com/

Yep, agree. Starting with Bootstrap is fairly frictionless, it has good library support, and there are heaps of documentations/examples/tutorials easily available. And if you need to change the look and feel, you can swap out the bootstrap.css file with one of the examples from Bootswatch - https://bootswatch.com/

Bootswatch is awesome! Recently I’ve just been getting the original Sass files and customizing there, and setting up a gulp pipeline to build my modified bootstrap CSS file. Works great for most things.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?

#26
Everyone's definition of 'clean' will vary, but when I think 'clean' I'm also thinking clean code. Some of the examples of clean templates given in the comments here pull down 2MB over the wire, ~500k-1MB of which is frequently JS, and that's before I've written a single line of custom functionality myself. For reference, React + react-dom is ~35kb gzipped.

Does anyone have any examples of templates that focus on clean, lean code as well as final layout? I'm thinking framework-agnostic low-to-no JS, coupled with something that doesn't use thousands of lines of CSS for a homepage layout.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?

#27
post #22

I struggled with this a lot, and was never satisfied, until I spent a few weeks doing CSS & flexbox lessons from Lynda.com (free from my library). Now I can get mostly where I want to go without frameworks and it is very empowering. It's just another language, it's not that tough.

Positioning jokes aside, learning CSS is easy.

Where most of us developers struggle with is making beautiful websites vs just something that works but looks ok.

One of the reasons bootstrap is so successful is that it's easy to use/integrate and produces a website that is very pleasant to look at.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?

#29
post #27
post #22

I struggled with this a lot, and was never satisfied, until I spent a few weeks doing CSS & flexbox lessons from Lynda.com (free from my library). Now I can get mostly where I want to go without frameworks and it is very empowering. It's just another language, it's not that tough.

Positioning jokes aside, learning CSS is easy. Where most of us developers struggle with is making beautiful websites vs just something that works but looks ok. One of the reasons bootstrap is so successful is that it's easy to use/integrate and produces a website that is very pleasant to look at.

I'm in this boat. I can structure and do layouty things, I just don't have a taste for design. This is where component libraries help out a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?

#30
I recently did an extensive test of many, many HTML templates.

The key thing I looked for was when the templates had been created and how often/how recently it had been updated - sites like Envato are loaded to the brim with old no-longer-updated templates.

I tested by loading them on the iPhone 6.

In almost every single case, the layout instantly broke, OR the side menu didn't work, OR the side menu felt "sticky" and would not smooth scroll, OR sliding the side menu scrolled the underlying page as well.

That was 90% of the templates or more - the quality level in general is terrible.

The ones we chose were from https://bootlab.io/themes - very nice quality.

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