Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

I recently removed bootstrap from a website I have that is composed entirely of static HTML documents [1]. It's a teaser / marketing site for my current project. The sample sites looked nice and I figured that since I and CSS are of basically nodding acquaintance -- why not?

I discovered that Bootstrap was just too featuresome for my requirements and I could not, for the life of me, get it to look correct. Everything was slightly out of place. It drove me nuts.

This led to a quest to find a simple stylesheet with a document-focused layout. Such a thing is not easily found; all and sundry are bloody obsessed with displaying their infinite genius through monstrously bloated code for designs that swoosh and swoop and resize and spin and have this and that and the captain's hat.

In the end I repurposed a stylesheet I'd commissioned as part of a wordpress theme from a good designer I know and trust[2]. A simple columnar layout. Done, dusted.

[1] http://confidest.com

[2] http://dribbble.com/karlbright . Insofar as the stylesheet you find above is bad, that's because I've been hacking on it for a few weeks since forking the original.

Also means you can override a lot of the default mixins fairly simply.

However I think 'powered' is taking things a bit far. Maybe 'styling' 1% of the web or 'powering the front-end' of 1% of the web. Wordpress uses the term 'powered' and that's fine because they actually do power a huge number of sites. That doesn't apply to most large sites running Bootstrap. Take Coinbase for example. They're still basically just running stock Bootstrap - but the site is 'powered' by a beefy custom backend.