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Great, Another Bootstrap Site

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Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#81

Post by aaronblohowiak »

masonhensley wrote: post #51
danso wrote: post #43

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?

I don't think anyone would suggest changing the grid system or standard font sizes as a way to differentiate your bootstrapped site. I wouldn't mess with the scaffolding type stuff unless you really need to create a specific desired effect. Off the top of my head, the quickest ways to make a bstrap site look unique and keep the haters happy would be: 1- Navbar, the dark gray will not fly, tweak the height of it too o…

Yessssss. SWIM should make a bootstrap theme builder with these in mind!

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#82

Post by bphogan »

From the article:

"Seeing a default Bootstrap “theme” site makes me leave it right away because I feel the person doesn’t care about what they are doing."

That's a great way to miss out on content, which I believe is the reason many web sites exist in the first place. I read lots of great articles on HN and unless the site is absolutely hard to read due to font size or contrast, I don't really notice what theme it's using.

To me, this comment comes across as snobbery. Us "in the business" types can spot these things, but in the end, does anyone care but us? Design is ridiculously important when selling a product or establishing a brand, but I don't believe design is a substitute for content.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#83

Post by lr »

It appears people who are writing about Bootstrap are not actually paying attention to its development... As of 2.0, you can customize the colors, and that helps a lot:

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/download.html

Also, it now has responsive design built in, and I am not going to spend my time building that from scratch; I'm going to use a framework!

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#85

Post by sirclueless »

jonknee wrote: post #35
kingsidharth wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a good thing. NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same. I can't remember name of one site that was made with Bo…

And yet Facebook, Twitter and Google all have a nearly identical top bar (sorry, Facebook's is blue). They have billions of page views to analyze and have all come to the same conclusion. > NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space . Boots…

I don't think anyone is complaining about the structural similarities between bootstrap sites. If 50% of the sites out there had fixed top-bar navs and responsive content made of three columns under a hero panel, everyone would win. The question is why everyone has light-black Helvetica Neue text on grey and white backgrounds with blue accents, with aqua-blue gradient pill buttons everywhere.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#86

Post by pacomerh »

But, weren't we expecting this though?, I mean we're raising the bar to a better standard looking web. I think it's a good thing, now more developers get to push more projects because it cuts time in the prototyping process. We still need to get chops on skinning to differentiate our projects, and stand out of the bunch. But in my opinion this is moving forward.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#87

Post by mfonda »

Speaking as someone who is absolutely terrible at design (I work almost entirely on backend stuff), I really like the idea of Bootstrap. It would allow me to focus on doing the work I enjoy, and not have to worry about design details that I don't care about.

I haven't used Bootstrap yet, but I plan to use it when I finally get around to making my personal website.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#88

Post by sirclueless »

jaimzob wrote: post #62
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…

Whenever I see "user's want standardized UIs" what I hear is "it's easier for me to _program_ standardized UIs". Users want UIs that are in-tune with their goals and mental models and if you deliver that, it won't matter what size and shape your buttons are. Snapping widgets together like lego bricks and declaring the result to be a "good" interface because it adheres to "standards" is sometimes true, but not nearly…

I wholeheartedly disagree. While power-users might "want UIs that are in-tune with their goals and mental models" I have helped my parents navigate computers enough to know that a great number of users have no mental model at all. All they know is that the button that gets to their email is third from the left on the bottom -- heaven forbid you change that.

It absolutely is beneficial to a newbie to say "Oh! This site looks a lot like xyz.com, maybe I can log in with this button."

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#89

Post by jurre »

rndmize wrote: post #56
typicalrunt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to this. When I talk to other designers and inevitably get into arguments with them about standards, I try to get them to see it from a consumer's point of view for non-IT products. There are a lot of non-IT products that have the same design: doors to houses, door knobs, rear-view mirrors, tires. The list goes on. While it's fun to see a new design to a Web site/app, even as a techie I sometimes struggle with usi…

I find this and the parent to be flawed. Door, knobs and so on come in a wide variety of shapes, materials and colors; and so do buttons (open an explorer or finder window - almost every means of interacting with these relies on a button, and they vary widely in appearance.) The argument this blog post makes isn't that there's a problem with standards, but that a lot of people are using bootstrap without any modifica…

But for a lot of things, I really don't care if it leaves an impression or not. I just want the thing to work well for my users. Bootstrap provides me with (almost) everything I need to do that. I'm not saying custom design isn't important or doesn't add value, I'm just saying it doesn't always do.

Re: Great, Another Bootstrap Site

#90

Post by user2459 »

Bootstrap is about usability, not design. It helps you set up sensible defaults for usability. Yes, you still need a designer to make your site look professional and stand out, but with the right tools you can at least make your site usable with less effort than it took last year.
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