Great, Another Bootstrap Site

This runs close to arguments made by TV advertisers, for "creative" and "original" ads that "engage" the watcher and produce a "holistic emotional experience", who are more interested in scoring at Cannes than selling product.

Not everyone goes to a website and bemoans yet another instance of Helvetica. Hell, most people couldn't identify Comic Sans if their lives depended on it. When I go to a site I want to get the information I want and do what I need to do quickly. In and out. If they're using a readable font, familiar icons, and common colours, per se, I don't care about originality.

It make sense for designers to see those things. It also makes sense for designers to be offended by the notion that Bootstrap may automate some of what they do. But extending this to Bootstrap == evil isn't rational.

Caveat: there are some sites that need to delight you. Content sites, e.g. NY Times, Facebook, etc., should put higher value on branding through UI. But inducing that this is necessary for all sites isn't tenable.

Bootstrap does one very important thing. It raises the previously very, very low bar of a poorly designed website. Exceptional designers will always be exceptional designers; poor designers (engineers? :P) now have a tool to put them on an even (I use this term VERY loosely, put away the pitchforks) playing field.

So what if it's another bootstrap site? At least it's not some times new roman on a green background monstrosity.

The "average" person is confused by things that are new and different. Making them learn a thousand different UIs just so "designers" can show off their artistic inabilities is one of the worst crimes perpetrated by the web.

To clear few things up lets discuss why Bootstrap is here.

Bootstrap should be taken as a base where from we can start building our applications right away while being real agile cause it provides us with mostly used design patterns and interactions which if we require can differ from in our design iterations (!imp). So again its essentially a framework providing some conventional patterns for development which I presume is bit like convention over configuration paradigm.

I would agree with the point that visual style matters as its is something which will molds into your brand identity and must be unique as all products are unique in one way or other. So yes its really a fail when most of the developers choose to maintain same Visual style in their sites which is to me is an utter disrespect of brand identity and something that must be avoided.

>Consistency is good for usability. Again, Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

As far as Usability is concerned to my understanding it is not affected in any way by fact that 2 sites have visually similar buttons but it is rather defined on the basis of content they provide and how it is presented(!imp). Difference between usability and visual appearance is quite understood I guess.

You might want to consider reading this post by Dave Winer "Why Bootstrap might be very important" http://scripting.com/stories/2012/03/07/whyBootstrapMightBeV... and Twitter Devblog - A brief history https://dev.twitter.com/blog/bootstrap-twitter

You have fallen into the common trap of seeing apps through developers' eyes. Please consider that almost no one in the world has heard of Bootstrap. Though it's captured our mindshare as developers, most of our users will not know nor care.

Basically none of the general public will say "Hey, this is a Bootstrap'ed application, I'm not using it." They just do not know nor care what Bootstrap is. If it looks professional and works as they expect, they will be happy.