Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Great, Another Bootstrap Site

drawar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 119 posts

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#41

Post by shykes »

Talk about a first-world problem! I'm sure the original Ford T was frowned upon by purists for their lack of originality.

For every spoiled designer turning away in disgust from a cookie-cutter bootstrap website, there are 50 web apps being created which would not exist without bootstrap !

For example: at dotCloud our ratio of backend/frontend engineers is 10/1. We've got people (me included) who can automate a cluster of hundreds of machines but are basically UI-impaired. Bootstrap has multiplied our individual velocity by at least 10: now our core platform engineers take the time to write web tools because it's achievable in a couple hours.

And when we finally grew our frontend team there was a point of reference for building a style guide, reusable page elements, etc.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#43

Post by danso »

The OP links to this site: http://builtwithbootstrap.com/

There are definitely a few sites that look barely-out-of-the-cookie-cutter...however, there are others that are only vaguely bootstrappish at a glance.

What do people consider the minimum amount of alterations before a bootstrap site looks unique enough? Besides color I mean....font-spacing and sizes? Going from a 12-col grid to 15/16/20-grid?

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#44

Post by goldvine »

You need to step out of the mindset of a designer and realize the average person doesn't know or care. If you are building an app/site for web people, then yea...Bootstrap is probably a bad choice because people will know instantly effort wasn't put into the front end and they will judge, consciously or subconsciously (customizing the variables doesn't fix this, people still know). But your article, and the other commenters, make the assumption that apps are only built for web people. I use Bootstrap, raw, as a starting point for MVPs I build for small businesses. It saves me a week's worth of frontend development (that will be redesigned anyways within a few months), and it lets me have an appealing, not mind blowing, look on the site. It takes my mind off of design, and focuses it on biz dev, marketing, and development to get the MVP off the ground. My audience, and millions of others could care less if Bootstrap is used, and would likely prefer it to an ugly developer-designed mess. My point is: Don't denounce an incredible framework that solves a key problem, just because you and several others misinterpret its purpose. And by the way, it is NOT the equivalent of Wordpress Themes, and it was likely never intended to be.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#45

Post by raghus »

mgrovr wrote: post #8
avolcano wrote: post #5

The sad part of this is that it's so easy to make your Bootstrap site look a little different, even for non-designers. I'm sure the idea here is "oh, I'm just making a quick MVP, or even a pre-MVP, or a weekend project, and Bootstrap makes the design super easy!" But if you're not going to change it at all , you might as well stick with browser defaults and not include a stylesheet at all - at this point, uncustomize…

I think the point that an uncustomized Bootstrap looking just as tacky as a plain html site is only true for people who hang around on HN or similar sites and so see many different sites using Bootstrap. For your average Joe on the internet, a Bootstrap-ped site will look much more professional and less tacky than a plain html site. So depending on your target audience, there might not be much motivation to spend any…

+1 (and a cookie). Average Joe is used to seeing sites like http://www.universityinnfresno.com/ or http://www.sunnyvalemetro.org/ and so, a clean site based on Bootstrap is a ton better than most of what he comes across. The # of Bootstrap-based sites is a tiny, tiny sliver of all sites out there and no one other than your dedicated HN-reader is going to come across a 2nd Bootstrap site the same day.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#46

Post by timbowhite »

While twitter bootstrap does help give websites a familiar layout for users (ie. nav starts in top left of header, login/account functionality in top right), I agree that without customization, it's helping to make the visual web more like eating vanilla paste.

I made http://convertunixtimestamp.com/ over the weekend, and I used bootstrap mainly for the responsive design. But I tried to customize it enough so that it wouldn't be recognizable as a bootstrap site.

And I chopped about 85% of it out b/c it just wasn't needed.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#47

Post by [deleted] »

avolcano wrote: post #5

The sad part of this is that it's so easy to make your Bootstrap site look a little different, even for non-designers. I'm sure the idea here is "oh, I'm just making a quick MVP, or even a pre-MVP, or a weekend project, and Bootstrap makes the design super easy!" But if you're not going to change it at all , you might as well stick with browser defaults and not include a stylesheet at all - at this point, uncustomize…

[deleted]

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#48

Post by tomjen3 »

So what? My goal is to create a site that makes money by solving a real problem for customers, not to satisfy some rule 'you have to create a new design thing'. The benefit of a startup is that we can shed the supposed rules of business -- you have to have an office, work from 9 till 5 where clothing, have a logo, have a design, etc, etc.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#49

Post by liquidsnake »

mgrovr wrote: post #8
avolcano wrote: post #5

The sad part of this is that it's so easy to make your Bootstrap site look a little different, even for non-designers. I'm sure the idea here is "oh, I'm just making a quick MVP, or even a pre-MVP, or a weekend project, and Bootstrap makes the design super easy!" But if you're not going to change it at all , you might as well stick with browser defaults and not include a stylesheet at all - at this point, uncustomize…

I think the point that an uncustomized Bootstrap looking just as tacky as a plain html site is only true for people who hang around on HN or similar sites and so see many different sites using Bootstrap. For your average Joe on the internet, a Bootstrap-ped site will look much more professional and less tacky than a plain html site. So depending on your target audience, there might not be much motivation to spend any…

Heck, I hang around on HN a lot and still think that the default Bootstrap theme looks great. Sure, a little variety wouldn't hurt and I'd probably change some stuff (like some of the colors) before deploying a real project with it but it looks and works great and it's better than anything I could make as a programmer.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#50

Post by harlanlewis »

carsongross wrote: post #6

Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. The design community generally doesn't like the idea of standards because they are a creative community, and there is no more damning phrase in the creative communities of the modern era than "unoriginal". But unoriginal is exactly what most people want with most of their web applications: they want to know how to work the things in…

Strong points. But from a usability perspective, Bootstrap would be much more significant if it were opinionated about interactions instead of just gradients, whitespace, and CTA placement.

The examples list of beautiful, usable, and identifiable products and services is long. People learn new patterns quickly - you just have to do a decent job designing the pattern.

Bootstrap's "non-coercive standards" are really just CSS shorthand for an approximation of Apple's successful, so-simple-it-feels-generic, already-easy-to-copy example. Anyone who never invested in a brand or consistent visual language before (and therefore simply wouldn't have a brand or consistent visual language) now just piggybacks Apple's aesthetic. Bootstrap is a small step further on the already well-worth path.

Post reply on HN