9 ms·

Great, Another Bootstrap Site

213 points by alecperkins 15y ago

helipad 15y ago
I now use Twitter Bootstrap as the starting point for all my projects, but not in the way many folk are. The LESS files are a goldmine for me. Pre-made mixins, cross-browser support, responsive media queries, color functions For me the LESS is being underplayed while the "default" style CSS is being overused.
aaronpk 15y ago
OTOH, you end up with stuff like this without it ;) http://i.imgur.com/S5JPD.png http://i.imgur.com/S5JPD.png
- rplnt 15y ago
  I actually tried to resize the tab to see something similar but was rather surprised by a responsive design. What browser do you use?
halayli 15y ago
Tweaking variables.less is enough to make the site look unique. Someone should write a pseudo-random variables.less generator.
avolcano 15y ago
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, uncustomized Boostrap looks just as tacky as a site that was black serif text on a white background with blue and purple links. It's easy to fix, and it's fun. Just take an hour to experiment - your site deserves it. Change up the fonts! Get a nice header font, especially if you're using a big "Hero" badge. Look at the Google Web Font gallery for some inspiration. Get some unique colors - different shades for different elements, build a nice visual hierarchy. Drop the top nav bar, unless you're doing docs or something that could actually use it. It looks a bit tacky, especially "position: fixed", when it's unnecessary. Now, on the other hand, you don't have to change everything. Leave the button gradients as they are, the grid system isn't exactly going to stick out, etc. You just need the overall look of your site to be unique - individual elements don't matter as much. http://www.savng.com/ http://www.savng.com/ is built with Bootstrap, but you couldn't tell it unless you really were looking (and thus noticed the "Add a deal" button and the pill navs at the bottom). Just be a bit different. It's easy, and rewarding.
- mgrovr 15y ago
  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 time customizing your site.
  - mindcrime 15y ago
    Bingo, give this man (or woman, or whatever) a cookie. Not everybody is like us, scouring the internet all day long for new startups and clicking every interesting link that shows up on HN. The average Joe off the street has probably seen 2 bootstrap based sites in his life, and has no idea what bootstrap is, and couldn't care less that a site he's using looks nearly identical to 3000 other sites that he'll most likely never visit. This whole "bootstrap backlash" is just a storm in a teacup and a waste of bandwidth.
    - swang 15y ago
      That is the way the Internet works. 1. Product, hardware or software, gains the hearts and minds of hackers everywhere. 2. Backlash.
  - AnthonyJoseph 15y ago
    This. 100 times this. For the people who actually matter (for non design/web related projects).... the customers, they do not even notice. If you aren't going after designers, or web devs themselves, bootstrap looks very professional....and I for one, am not here to stroke designers egos, but to make money.
  - raghus 15y ago
    +1 (and a cookie). Average Joe is used to seeing sites like http://www.universityinnfresno.com/ http://www.universityinnfresno.com/ or http://www.sunnyvalemetro.org/ 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.
carsongross 15y ago
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 instinctively and not learn another UI for this or that task. As a small example: with bootstrap, buttons look the same, so users instinctively recognize them without additional mental effort. Developers can focus on developing applications that are functional and usable, rather than tweaking CSS to make things "look right". I think bootstrap, and the non-coercive standardization of web applications it is fostering, is one of the most important developments of 2011-2012. I do think means there will be less need for straight-up aesthetic designers, with UX and information architecture becoming more important.
- typicalrunt 15y ago
  +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 using the sexiest websites simply because the designer has changed what I perceive to be a standard usability feature. I can't imagine what Joe 6-Pack thinks when he encounters these sites.
  - rndmize 15y ago
    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 modification - which is ironic, because modifying bootstrap is vastly easier and safer than creating a new design from scratch. It takes very little to adjust the colors of the buttons provided by bootstrap, or the links, or add a texture to the background, or change some fonts out (Google webfonts makes this ridiculously easy). When this isn't done, the site leaves no lasting impression unless what it provides is so amazing I can't possibly forget it (this is pretty rare). For me, power tools would be something that goes at the far functional end of a functional/aesthetic design scale, and even then companies will use widely different colors to separate themselves from their competitors and make them easy to recognize. Perhaps there's something to be learned there.
mckoss 15y ago
Why value uniqueness over simplicity, cleanliness, and learn-ability? When the Mac came out, the primary selling point of the interface was that every application could share a common way of doing things and present it's capabilities to the user. Bootstrap provides some of this for web applications. I'm not trying to keep my users from being "bored"; I'm trying to give them a simple approachable application where they can get stuff done. A gratuitous re-design serves only the ego of the designer.
tmcw 15y ago
/all day long I have been thinking this but never expressing it because it's clear it would trigger a swarm of disagreement which is all valid but also so not the point, but I'm so glad someone else wrote it so thanks/ So thank you sir. I will bury my Bootstrap dislike deep, deep down where noone can detect it. At least I get to vent my jQuery dislike nowadays.
bradleyland 15y ago
Effort is a finite resource. If I am a team of one, and I need to roll a website for my new widget, I have two choices: I can route effort away from further development/refinement of my widget to "design" a proper website, or I can use Bootstrap and conserve that effort to spend on my core product, widgets. That's a tough decision. I'm not sure there's a "correct" answer. I think it depends on what you value, and what you believe your target user will value: a better product, or a better website.
- smokinn 15y ago
  This. If you're actually building a product to sell people it behooves you to put some effort into deviating from the base styles. On the other hand if you're like me and use it every so often for a one-off project that you have no plan on monetizing then why not? I don't particularly care about the UI look and feel, I just don't want it to look awful which it would if I were to design it myself. Bootstrap gives me a decent looking sane UI with guidelines for me to follow to keep it all sane. Other than that, I just want to work on functionality.
  - vinothgopi 15y ago
    I have a slightly different view. I prefer to spend time designing a unique/good looking website but I do not like to waste my time creating my own buttons, text boxes etc. Modern design styles leans towards a 3D css button and nice large curve text boxes. Just grab them from bootstrap and use the grid for the layouts. Do everything else on your own.
- cleanshakeapp 15y ago
  I agree. I think you can use bootstrap as a starting point then move on from there. It just helps things look nice while you allocate resources elsewhere for the time being.
s3b 15y ago
If you're looking for easy ways to customize it, have a look at http://stylebootstrap.info/ http://stylebootstrap.info/ . This was on HN recently.
- praxeologist 15y ago
  More here too: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/20-beautiful-resources-that-complement-twitter-bootstrap/ http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/20-beautiful-resources-that...
latchkey 15y ago
I think the real issue is that people are using all of bootstrap to create their weekend hack site and not bothering to even try to be creative with it. For my site, https://www.voo.st/ https://www.voo.st/ we just used a bunch of elements from bootstrap and also parts of the core. We integrated that into an existing theme that we bought for cheap. For example, the buttons and the form elements are great, we took the header bar and made it a footer. I really think that with some creative thought, bootstrap is really great and much needed in the community.
Kiro 15y ago
I wouldn't mind if every site in the world looked like vanilla bootstrap.
phatbyte 15y ago
I use bootstrap mostly for prototyping and get it up and running. However, the way I see it, twitter bootstrap for instance is a very well done front-end framework, and puts a high bar for the front-end dev, which is always good.
va_coder 15y ago
I think this post is ridiculous. You know how many great law firms have website themes from the 90s? How many great restaurants have that crappy flash intro? Lots of them and I'm still going to use their service regardless. "How depressing is it to go through this gallery of sites built with Bootstrap?" How depressing is it to go to some site that's been hyped up, see a great design, and then see no compelling product behind it?
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  You may not be swayed by the design of sites but the majority of people are. A big mistake people make when approaching design is thinking their attitudes apply to "most people". It takes training and experience to really get a feel for how "the average person" will react to something.
  - nknight 15y ago
    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.
- FreshCode 15y ago
  We would both prefer to use a great product with a crappy website than a crappy product with a great website, but I think the standard has shifted from, "Do you have a website?" up to "How does your website design look compared to your competitor?" And I think that's a good thing.
quellhorst 15y ago
Great, another person bitching about seeing bootstrap sites... I love the look of bootstrap sites. Having identical looking sites beats the shitty design most of these sites would have had before bootstrap.
- vinothgopi 15y ago
  It comes down to the same issues that I have with templates of tumblr,posterous and wp. They all look the same. I think bootstrap should be used as a way to jumpstart the design process and not built a WHOLE website using the components bootstrap provides. When I see that grey-black gradient nav bar i go "Haizz yet another bootstrap site."
joedev 15y ago
For the same reason that, as a user, I benefit from Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, I am fine using Bootstrap applications.
jonknee 15y ago
I've enjoyed Bootstrap for building internal web apps. It's hard to justify a big design budget for something used by a handful of people internally (unless design is your business), so just stock Bootstrap is a huge step up. It's compatible in the browser you use, it's responsive, it's easy to put anything where it needs to go. That really saves time, especially for projects that have a lot of different screens and a ton of "just add this here" requests.
j45 15y ago
Would we think the same thing when we saw a raw html form as a demo / proof of concept? I agree bootstrap is spreading, maybe we see it a bit more being in the startup space. But, any average internet user I've let try out a quick idea in bootstrap has always commented on how nice it looks for a demo. About variety, the more developers get used to Bootstrap, the more they will modify it. For many, just using anything this polished is a big jump, we just have to encourage customization of tools like bootstrap (much like 960js and others allow).
chadhietala 15y ago
We recently have been working on http://www.wanttechnologies.com http://www.wanttechnologies.com which uses bootstrap. But you can't really tell. Only really used the "scaffolding" and buttons.
nirvdrum 15y ago
I think the author hits on a good point that he may just be too polite to really call out. A lot of developers get annoyed when designers use some framework to make building web pages simpler and then say they can build sites. This just seems to be the opposite reaction: devs using design frameworks to bang out their sites. Both should be lauded for making it simpler for people to get basic work done. Neither should be confused with what a serious professional can accomplish. When that happens, things get really weird. I personally believe the rash of web designers calling themselves Rails devs really screwed with the Boston area Ruby/Rails market.
gregorymichael 15y ago
Bootstrap looks tired to us, the Hacker News crowd, who are into startups and see new ones everyday. The rest of the population, the actual market of these startups, isn't seeing this high concentration, and has no idea what Twitter Bootstrap is.
shykes 15y ago
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.
wanderful 15y ago
Ironically, the author appears to borrow quite heavily from Dustin Curtis: Layout: http://dcurt.is/ http://dcurt.is/ Transparent border: http://blog.dustincurtis.com/the-dcurtis-manifesto http://blog.dustincurtis.com/the-dcurtis-manifesto
danso 15y ago
The OP links to this site: http://builtwithbootstrap.com/ 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?
- masonhensley 15y ago
  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 or remove it all together. 2- Background of your container, give it some life. Here is a good place to start- http://subtlepatterns.com/ http://subtlepatterns.com/ 3- Special font for your branding/ H tags, boom (http://www.google.com/webfonts http://www.google.com/webfonts) 4- change up the button colors a tad, if only one, the blue one, it seems to be everywhere. The above items will take you 15-30 min depending on how many combinations you try out & will take you pretty far.
  - aaronblohowiak 15y ago
    Yessssss. SWIM should make a bootstrap theme builder with these in mind!
goldvine 15y ago
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.
timbowhite 15y ago
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/ 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.
tomjen3 15y ago
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.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
weixiyen 15y ago
When I saw font awesome, I did not think about how to use it with a bootstrap theme. I saw it as a totally separate entity completely. To be honest Font Awesome was more impressive to me and potentially have much further usage beyond just on bootstrap-themed sites.
tbatterii 15y ago
i feel the same way about magazines with their pages, and why are they always square? seriously though, poo pooing something that gets you a decent look and feel quickly is just being a self important ass. Not every web site has to be an exercise in css masturbation and cross browser dick swinging. i read this entire article in the voice of the comic book guy from the simpsons. /written during my lunch hour spent tracking down IE8 bugs.
hemancuso 15y ago
Design is very much the culmination of many details and decisions. What is great about bootstrap is all of those decisions are made for you, leaving you to focus on the part you're good at - the app. A nice palette of widgets and views makes for a consistent and fairly intuitive experience. Nobody argues Mac apps look too much like one another. Folk get angry when they stop looking like Mac apps. But this is the web, not the Mac. Websites are expected to look different from one another. But when a engineer starts customizing bootstrap so that it "doesn't look bootstrap" I think the end product is often a broken design with awkward colors, margins and compositions. I think the author of the OP would enjoy a greater set of bootstrap themes, something like bootswatch.com and furthermore it seems like a great opportunity for a company like themeforest.net or someone similar. Bootstrap is popular not because of visual styling. What sets it apart is incredible documentation and programmer-friendly semantic markup. Regarding bootstrap as a theme is a disservice. Bootstrap is a framework which could use some more high quality visual themes.
erjjones 15y ago
+1 for CarsonGross. Bootstrap is a very good thing. AlecPerkins quit your complaining and give us something edifying.
- alecperkins 15y ago
  Not my article, though I do think it raises some valid points and would prompt interesting discussion (hence submitting it). More broadly, it seems as though a lot of people on HN often respond to posts as if the author and submitter are one and the same. I recently saw a post, submitted by Jeremy Ashkenas, about why the author doesn't use CoffeeScript. The top comment directly challenged the submitter, calling out 'his statements', as if he were the author.
justjimmy 15y ago
Bootstrap is great for what the name implies, but when you are delivering the product to the public, it's not good enough. The perfect example is iOS apps. Can you imagine your designers simply copying and pasting from iOS's default theme? It's very bland, it turns off users before they even use it (which in effect, is bad UX. Bootstrap has both + and -, good UXer will see this and adjust accordingly/depending on the phase of the product). I use this resource for my wireframe/mockups http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-gui-psd-v4/ http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-gui-psd-v4/ Personally I won't ever use it in a beta product/website as is. There's nothing wrong with bootstrapping to map out user flow, and give clear indication a button is a button, a list is a list etc. But when it's time to up your game, give access to the public, default bootstrap visual/color needs to go. Humans judge a book by its cover. If you release your bootstrap website, users will have to work and over come the barrier of your bland looking site and then decide if it's worth it to try your product. PS: The point about lawyers have crappy websites and yet we still use them is because our expectations changes depending on the organization. Do we expect government websites to be wow and dazzle us? Do we expect a new Apple product's website to use bootstrap? Do we expect a 2 month old startup website to be featured on Behance's frontpage? And remember who your early adopters are – if it's people that scours HN or see countless bootstrapped sites, what are they going to think when they see your site? Would they be understanding and go 'Oh its okay - they're a startup, I'll give them some leeway when it comes to visual design' or 'Would they go eff this, these guys don't care about design or visuals. I'll come back later'.
nileshtrivedi 15y ago
I think I agree. Bootstrap is not bad but using the default visual scheme brings noise and unwanted association with other websites which the user might have seen. At the minimum, pick a different color scheme from http://bootswatch.com/#gallery http://bootswatch.com/#gallery
parasitius 15y ago
Oh? You've seen bootstrap and now feel like leaving a site? Congrats you are in the 0.001%. Am I supposed to care? Truth is I've heard moaning and bitching about bootstrap on hacker news for the better part of a year now. I have never touched bootstrap myself, and so even with all this familiarity I have no idea what a bootstrap site looks like and am absolutely unable to pick one out of a lineup. If I can't do it with this amount of familiarity I doubt you'll find one in 10,000 ordinary users who can. Hence --- who cares.
methodin 15y ago
Most people will never even know what the hell you are talking about with the word "Bootstrap", so just because we can recognize these things as developers/designers does not mean it has any influence whatsoever on your users. I'd much rather see a generic bootstrap site than a piece of crap design personally. I would hope many of you would agree.
jamiequint 15y ago
'Normals' (http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/ http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/) don't give a shit. Unless your audience is purely people deep into technology that look at and analyze sites all day the average person isn't going to know the difference between the site you spent a month designing to be pixel perfect and your average bootstrap site. I tend to find that focusing on the user interactions is way more valuable than focusing on the 'design' (meaning how it looks), bootstrap makes the 'design' part easy, freeing me up to spend my time on other things. This is generally a big win.
Buzaga 15y ago
Websites and projects that are meant to be used by non-techies probably wouldn't regard this as an issue... of course since we are techies we notice at the first hit of the eye, but normal people? my guess is that it will take much a bigger part of the web using bootstrap and a lot of time for them to notice and start to care.... also, I really suck at design, I f*cking hate it, it takes me weeks to produce something acceptable even with bootstrap...what am I going to do?
- Buzaga 15y ago
  I mean, I can get annoyed looking at this bootstrap list too, I also believe the least that should be done is try to custom it a little so it doesn't look just like another bootstrap page... but again, webdesigning is a PAINFUL(and I mean it) thing for me to do...
Yxven 15y ago
The real problem is that web design is about 100x harder than it should be. I'm not saying there shouldn't be room for the artists to outshine the rest of us, but there's no excuse for why placing elements with css is so hard. Different browsers shouldn't have different names and syntax for the same features. The cascade makes it difficult to mix templates without adjusting a million different things. Bootstrap solves most of this. That is why it's becoming prevalent. The only way this trend will stop is a high-quality cross-browser WYSIWYG editor.
virtualeyes 15y ago
I agree with the OP, pretty spot on, while bootstrap sites look good, they generally all look the same. For CRUD/admin, yes, bootstrap is a definite go; for public front facing, not for my clients. Client identity should be based on a unique brand, and bootstrap, short of major tweaks, does not provide that. To umm, boot, boostrap is a wee bit on the heavy side for my liking (80KB css minified), and the javascript features are not mind blowing (for example, would prefer flyout menus like in Foundation or HTML Kickstart). I'm rolling with Skeleton and jquerytools (sadly behind the maintenance curve) on the front end. If bootstrap becomes themeable, I'll consider using on the front end, but until then, differentiation is king in my book.
bphogan 15y ago
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.
lr 15y ago
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 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!
YooLi 15y ago
"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." Get over yourself.
pacomerh 15y ago
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.
mfonda 15y ago
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.
user2459 15y ago
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.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
chromedude 15y ago
Have been wanting to write something like this for the past few months. Glad someone else did it. It is making me go crazy!
dwrowe 15y ago
I think the benefit of something like Bootstrap is getting an idea off the floor with _some_ nod towards aesthtics. If I can't afford a designer, I'm happy to use someones idea of a 'default' to get it to the point that it is functional, relatively easy on the eyes, etc. Then, when the funds / time is available focus on tweaking things to not appear like the bootstrap default.
erikabele 15y ago
Looks like most of the negative comments are from designers which totally makes sense; you're getting paid for coming up with neat little buttons and so on... but on the other hand, why didn't you designers come up with a good (open-source) framework for these things. Teach people, give them rope, enable them... oh, and there are already tools like bootswatch coming up. This is not the end, just the beginning for a sane design for the rest of us (aka the developers).
danneu 15y ago
I think this entire assertion has the wrong idea. This idea would be valid if the universal alternative to using Bootstrap is some impressive design stitched together by your in-house crack team of designers. But I'm sure the alternative to Bootstrap for most people is for the developer to use his own html/css know-how to construct something passable as he goes. So, for most people, I'd wager that Bootstrap is mostly just a time optimization that saves the developer from spending time on a design that would have been far less impressive anyways, that saves the developer from burning time that could be allocated to the actual product. I find it silly to condemn people for how they allocate their time. Even the whole pro-Bootstrap chorus of "But it's just a standard interface for the web" is silly. Really? I have yet to even stumble across a Bootstrap website in the wild that wasn't linked to from a Show HN. Are these monthly Bootstrap rants conflating the HN echo chamber with the internet? Weekend solo-dev projects with funded business websites? I guarantee it. The likening of Bootstrap to Wordpress' default theme is telling. Does anyone here really encounter WP's default theme in the wild? I sure don't. Maybe the majority of WP installs still have the default theme, but it's in the same way that the majority of WAMP installs still have the default "It Works!" Apache screen on localhost. I just don't get the point. If Bootstrap really was some prevalent interface that most of the web started using, then you guys that do have the crack team of designers at your disposal should be excited! Here's your chance to stand out! But I'm using Bootstrap because it's literally faster than any other alternative I can think of until I have someone separately working on a UI branch that I can merge into my code. If I took your advice and stopped using Bootstrap because you assume "I don't care enough" to make a custom design, I'd end up with something that will probably look worse and guaranteed to take much longer to create giving me more bottlenecks as I get hamstringed by aesthetics when I could instead be funneling my efforts into business logic and not into something that's rather trivial to switch out when my app is deployed and my time frees up to address less-critical concerns.
kisielk 15y ago
From the perspective of someone who frequents Hacker News then of course it's going to seem like there's a ton of sites using the nearly-stock bootstrap look. That's because people like us actually look at sites like "Built With Bootstrap" and check out people's demos of bootstrap sites. Back in the real world the average internet user will likely never notice. Most sites in the early stages will have few visitors and due to variety of interests it's unlikely that a single person will be using a large enough number of these sites to start realizing this problem. As the successful sites grow larger and move beyond the early stages it's likely the developers will have access to more resources to improve their site theme over time and move away from the bootstrap look.
JumpCrisscross 15y ago
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.
ebzlo 15y ago
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.
justinbaker 15y ago
Thanks for putting down Ruby on Rails developers everywhere. Comparing a DESIGN framework to an actual web framework, with much more actually to it is nonsensical. Beginners sure can use Rails. So can the experience programmer. The budding Rails developer still needs to learn concepts and programming skills to create his/her application. The use of a framework doesn't imply a programmer using it learns nothing. Now which is more likely? Someone creating a well programmed, secure website from scratch to "learn how to program", or to use a well tested, and proven framework? People don't use Rails to simply "learn how to program". You are completely missing this.
joedev 15y ago
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.

213 points by alecperkins 15y ago

I now use Twitter Bootstrap as the starting point for all my projects, but not in the way many folk are. The LESS files are a goldmine for me. Pre-made mixins, cross-browser support, responsive media queries, color functions For me the LESS is being underplayed while the "default" style CSS is being overused.

aaronpk 15y ago

OTOH, you end up with stuff like this without it ;) http://i.imgur.com/S5JPD.png http://i.imgur.com/S5JPD.png

rplnt 15y ago
I actually tried to resize the tab to see something similar but was rather surprised by a responsive design. What browser do you use?

halayli 15y ago

Tweaking variables.less is enough to make the site look unique. Someone should write a pseudo-random variables.less generator.

avolcano 15y ago

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, uncustomized Boostrap looks just as tacky as a site that was black serif text on a white background with blue and purple links. It's easy to fix, and it's fun. Just take an hour to experiment - your site deserves it. Change up the fonts! Get a nice header font, especially if you're using a big "Hero" badge. Look at the Google Web Font gallery for some inspiration. Get some unique colors - different shades for different elements, build a nice visual hierarchy. Drop the top nav bar, unless you're doing docs or something that could actually use it. It looks a bit tacky, especially "position: fixed", when it's unnecessary. Now, on the other hand, you don't have to change everything. Leave the button gradients as they are, the grid system isn't exactly going to stick out, etc. You just need the overall look of your site to be unique - individual elements don't matter as much. http://www.savng.com/ http://www.savng.com/ is built with Bootstrap, but you couldn't tell it unless you really were looking (and thus noticed the "Add a deal" button and the pill navs at the bottom). Just be a bit different. It's easy, and rewarding.

mgrovr 15y ago
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 time customizing your site.
- mindcrime 15y ago
  Bingo, give this man (or woman, or whatever) a cookie. Not everybody is like us, scouring the internet all day long for new startups and clicking every interesting link that shows up on HN. The average Joe off the street has probably seen 2 bootstrap based sites in his life, and has no idea what bootstrap is, and couldn't care less that a site he's using looks nearly identical to 3000 other sites that he'll most likely never visit. This whole "bootstrap backlash" is just a storm in a teacup and a waste of bandwidth.
  - swang 15y ago
    That is the way the Internet works. 1. Product, hardware or software, gains the hearts and minds of hackers everywhere. 2. Backlash.
- AnthonyJoseph 15y ago
  This. 100 times this. For the people who actually matter (for non design/web related projects).... the customers, they do not even notice. If you aren't going after designers, or web devs themselves, bootstrap looks very professional....and I for one, am not here to stroke designers egos, but to make money.
- raghus 15y ago
  +1 (and a cookie). Average Joe is used to seeing sites like http://www.universityinnfresno.com/ http://www.universityinnfresno.com/ or http://www.sunnyvalemetro.org/ 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.

carsongross 15y ago

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 instinctively and not learn another UI for this or that task. As a small example: with bootstrap, buttons look the same, so users instinctively recognize them without additional mental effort. Developers can focus on developing applications that are functional and usable, rather than tweaking CSS to make things "look right". I think bootstrap, and the non-coercive standardization of web applications it is fostering, is one of the most important developments of 2011-2012. I do think means there will be less need for straight-up aesthetic designers, with UX and information architecture becoming more important.

typicalrunt 15y ago
+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 using the sexiest websites simply because the designer has changed what I perceive to be a standard usability feature. I can't imagine what Joe 6-Pack thinks when he encounters these sites.
- rndmize 15y ago
  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 modification - which is ironic, because modifying bootstrap is vastly easier and safer than creating a new design from scratch. It takes very little to adjust the colors of the buttons provided by bootstrap, or the links, or add a texture to the background, or change some fonts out (Google webfonts makes this ridiculously easy). When this isn't done, the site leaves no lasting impression unless what it provides is so amazing I can't possibly forget it (this is pretty rare). For me, power tools would be something that goes at the far functional end of a functional/aesthetic design scale, and even then companies will use widely different colors to separate themselves from their competitors and make them easy to recognize. Perhaps there's something to be learned there.

mckoss 15y ago

Why value uniqueness over simplicity, cleanliness, and learn-ability? When the Mac came out, the primary selling point of the interface was that every application could share a common way of doing things and present it's capabilities to the user. Bootstrap provides some of this for web applications. I'm not trying to keep my users from being "bored"; I'm trying to give them a simple approachable application where they can get stuff done. A gratuitous re-design serves only the ego of the designer.

tmcw 15y ago

/all day long I have been thinking this but never expressing it because it's clear it would trigger a swarm of disagreement which is all valid but also so not the point, but I'm so glad someone else wrote it so thanks/ So thank you sir. I will bury my Bootstrap dislike deep, deep down where noone can detect it. At least I get to vent my jQuery dislike nowadays.

bradleyland 15y ago

Effort is a finite resource. If I am a team of one, and I need to roll a website for my new widget, I have two choices: I can route effort away from further development/refinement of my widget to "design" a proper website, or I can use Bootstrap and conserve that effort to spend on my core product, widgets. That's a tough decision. I'm not sure there's a "correct" answer. I think it depends on what you value, and what you believe your target user will value: a better product, or a better website.

smokinn 15y ago
This. If you're actually building a product to sell people it behooves you to put some effort into deviating from the base styles. On the other hand if you're like me and use it every so often for a one-off project that you have no plan on monetizing then why not? I don't particularly care about the UI look and feel, I just don't want it to look awful which it would if I were to design it myself. Bootstrap gives me a decent looking sane UI with guidelines for me to follow to keep it all sane. Other than that, I just want to work on functionality.
- vinothgopi 15y ago
  I have a slightly different view. I prefer to spend time designing a unique/good looking website but I do not like to waste my time creating my own buttons, text boxes etc. Modern design styles leans towards a 3D css button and nice large curve text boxes. Just grab them from bootstrap and use the grid for the layouts. Do everything else on your own.
cleanshakeapp 15y ago
I agree. I think you can use bootstrap as a starting point then move on from there. It just helps things look nice while you allocate resources elsewhere for the time being.

s3b 15y ago

If you're looking for easy ways to customize it, have a look at http://stylebootstrap.info/ http://stylebootstrap.info/ . This was on HN recently.

praxeologist 15y ago
More here too: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/20-beautiful-resources-that-complement-twitter-bootstrap/ http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/20-beautiful-resources-that...

latchkey 15y ago

I think the real issue is that people are using all of bootstrap to create their weekend hack site and not bothering to even try to be creative with it. For my site, https://www.voo.st/ https://www.voo.st/ we just used a bunch of elements from bootstrap and also parts of the core. We integrated that into an existing theme that we bought for cheap. For example, the buttons and the form elements are great, we took the header bar and made it a footer. I really think that with some creative thought, bootstrap is really great and much needed in the community.

Kiro 15y ago

I wouldn't mind if every site in the world looked like vanilla bootstrap.

phatbyte 15y ago

I use bootstrap mostly for prototyping and get it up and running. However, the way I see it, twitter bootstrap for instance is a very well done front-end framework, and puts a high bar for the front-end dev, which is always good.

va_coder 15y ago

I think this post is ridiculous. You know how many great law firms have website themes from the 90s? How many great restaurants have that crappy flash intro? Lots of them and I'm still going to use their service regardless. "How depressing is it to go through this gallery of sites built with Bootstrap?" How depressing is it to go to some site that's been hyped up, see a great design, and then see no compelling product behind it?

billpatrianakos 15y ago
You may not be swayed by the design of sites but the majority of people are. A big mistake people make when approaching design is thinking their attitudes apply to "most people". It takes training and experience to really get a feel for how "the average person" will react to something.
- nknight 15y ago
  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.
FreshCode 15y ago
We would both prefer to use a great product with a crappy website than a crappy product with a great website, but I think the standard has shifted from, "Do you have a website?" up to "How does your website design look compared to your competitor?" And I think that's a good thing.

quellhorst 15y ago

Great, another person bitching about seeing bootstrap sites... I love the look of bootstrap sites. Having identical looking sites beats the shitty design most of these sites would have had before bootstrap.

vinothgopi 15y ago
It comes down to the same issues that I have with templates of tumblr,posterous and wp. They all look the same. I think bootstrap should be used as a way to jumpstart the design process and not built a WHOLE website using the components bootstrap provides. When I see that grey-black gradient nav bar i go "Haizz yet another bootstrap site."

joedev 15y ago

For the same reason that, as a user, I benefit from Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, I am fine using Bootstrap applications.

jonknee 15y ago

I've enjoyed Bootstrap for building internal web apps. It's hard to justify a big design budget for something used by a handful of people internally (unless design is your business), so just stock Bootstrap is a huge step up. It's compatible in the browser you use, it's responsive, it's easy to put anything where it needs to go. That really saves time, especially for projects that have a lot of different screens and a ton of "just add this here" requests.

j45 15y ago

Would we think the same thing when we saw a raw html form as a demo / proof of concept? I agree bootstrap is spreading, maybe we see it a bit more being in the startup space. But, any average internet user I've let try out a quick idea in bootstrap has always commented on how nice it looks for a demo. About variety, the more developers get used to Bootstrap, the more they will modify it. For many, just using anything this polished is a big jump, we just have to encourage customization of tools like bootstrap (much like 960js and others allow).

chadhietala 15y ago

We recently have been working on http://www.wanttechnologies.com http://www.wanttechnologies.com which uses bootstrap. But you can't really tell. Only really used the "scaffolding" and buttons.

nirvdrum 15y ago

I think the author hits on a good point that he may just be too polite to really call out. A lot of developers get annoyed when designers use some framework to make building web pages simpler and then say they can build sites. This just seems to be the opposite reaction: devs using design frameworks to bang out their sites. Both should be lauded for making it simpler for people to get basic work done. Neither should be confused with what a serious professional can accomplish. When that happens, things get really weird. I personally believe the rash of web designers calling themselves Rails devs really screwed with the Boston area Ruby/Rails market.

gregorymichael 15y ago

Bootstrap looks tired to us, the Hacker News crowd, who are into startups and see new ones everyday. The rest of the population, the actual market of these startups, isn't seeing this high concentration, and has no idea what Twitter Bootstrap is.

shykes 15y ago

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.

wanderful 15y ago

Ironically, the author appears to borrow quite heavily from Dustin Curtis: Layout: http://dcurt.is/ http://dcurt.is/ Transparent border: http://blog.dustincurtis.com/the-dcurtis-manifesto http://blog.dustincurtis.com/the-dcurtis-manifesto

danso 15y ago

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

masonhensley 15y ago
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 or remove it all together. 2- Background of your container, give it some life. Here is a good place to start- http://subtlepatterns.com/ http://subtlepatterns.com/ 3- Special font for your branding/ H tags, boom (http://www.google.com/webfonts http://www.google.com/webfonts) 4- change up the button colors a tad, if only one, the blue one, it seems to be everywhere. The above items will take you 15-30 min depending on how many combinations you try out & will take you pretty far.
- aaronblohowiak 15y ago
  Yessssss. SWIM should make a bootstrap theme builder with these in mind!

goldvine 15y ago

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.

timbowhite 15y ago

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/ 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.

tomjen3 15y ago

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.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

weixiyen 15y ago

When I saw font awesome, I did not think about how to use it with a bootstrap theme. I saw it as a totally separate entity completely. To be honest Font Awesome was more impressive to me and potentially have much further usage beyond just on bootstrap-themed sites.

tbatterii 15y ago

i feel the same way about magazines with their pages, and why are they always square? seriously though, poo pooing something that gets you a decent look and feel quickly is just being a self important ass. Not every web site has to be an exercise in css masturbation and cross browser dick swinging. i read this entire article in the voice of the comic book guy from the simpsons. /written during my lunch hour spent tracking down IE8 bugs.

hemancuso 15y ago

Design is very much the culmination of many details and decisions. What is great about bootstrap is all of those decisions are made for you, leaving you to focus on the part you're good at - the app. A nice palette of widgets and views makes for a consistent and fairly intuitive experience. Nobody argues Mac apps look too much like one another. Folk get angry when they stop looking like Mac apps. But this is the web, not the Mac. Websites are expected to look different from one another. But when a engineer starts customizing bootstrap so that it "doesn't look bootstrap" I think the end product is often a broken design with awkward colors, margins and compositions. I think the author of the OP would enjoy a greater set of bootstrap themes, something like bootswatch.com and furthermore it seems like a great opportunity for a company like themeforest.net or someone similar. Bootstrap is popular not because of visual styling. What sets it apart is incredible documentation and programmer-friendly semantic markup. Regarding bootstrap as a theme is a disservice. Bootstrap is a framework which could use some more high quality visual themes.

erjjones 15y ago

+1 for CarsonGross. Bootstrap is a very good thing. AlecPerkins quit your complaining and give us something edifying.

alecperkins 15y ago
Not my article, though I do think it raises some valid points and would prompt interesting discussion (hence submitting it). More broadly, it seems as though a lot of people on HN often respond to posts as if the author and submitter are one and the same. I recently saw a post, submitted by Jeremy Ashkenas, about why the author doesn't use CoffeeScript. The top comment directly challenged the submitter, calling out 'his statements', as if he were the author.

justjimmy 15y ago

Bootstrap is great for what the name implies, but when you are delivering the product to the public, it's not good enough. The perfect example is iOS apps. Can you imagine your designers simply copying and pasting from iOS's default theme? It's very bland, it turns off users before they even use it (which in effect, is bad UX. Bootstrap has both + and -, good UXer will see this and adjust accordingly/depending on the phase of the product). I use this resource for my wireframe/mockups http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-gui-psd-v4/ http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-gui-psd-v4/ Personally I won't ever use it in a beta product/website as is. There's nothing wrong with bootstrapping to map out user flow, and give clear indication a button is a button, a list is a list etc. But when it's time to up your game, give access to the public, default bootstrap visual/color needs to go. Humans judge a book by its cover. If you release your bootstrap website, users will have to work and over come the barrier of your bland looking site and then decide if it's worth it to try your product. PS: The point about lawyers have crappy websites and yet we still use them is because our expectations changes depending on the organization. Do we expect government websites to be wow and dazzle us? Do we expect a new Apple product's website to use bootstrap? Do we expect a 2 month old startup website to be featured on Behance's frontpage? And remember who your early adopters are – if it's people that scours HN or see countless bootstrapped sites, what are they going to think when they see your site? Would they be understanding and go 'Oh its okay - they're a startup, I'll give them some leeway when it comes to visual design' or 'Would they go eff this, these guys don't care about design or visuals. I'll come back later'.

nileshtrivedi 15y ago

I think I agree. Bootstrap is not bad but using the default visual scheme brings noise and unwanted association with other websites which the user might have seen. At the minimum, pick a different color scheme from http://bootswatch.com/#gallery http://bootswatch.com/#gallery

parasitius 15y ago

Oh? You've seen bootstrap and now feel like leaving a site? Congrats you are in the 0.001%. Am I supposed to care? Truth is I've heard moaning and bitching about bootstrap on hacker news for the better part of a year now. I have never touched bootstrap myself, and so even with all this familiarity I have no idea what a bootstrap site looks like and am absolutely unable to pick one out of a lineup. If I can't do it with this amount of familiarity I doubt you'll find one in 10,000 ordinary users who can. Hence --- who cares.

methodin 15y ago

Most people will never even know what the hell you are talking about with the word "Bootstrap", so just because we can recognize these things as developers/designers does not mean it has any influence whatsoever on your users. I'd much rather see a generic bootstrap site than a piece of crap design personally. I would hope many of you would agree.

jamiequint 15y ago

'Normals' (http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/ http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/) don't give a shit. Unless your audience is purely people deep into technology that look at and analyze sites all day the average person isn't going to know the difference between the site you spent a month designing to be pixel perfect and your average bootstrap site. I tend to find that focusing on the user interactions is way more valuable than focusing on the 'design' (meaning how it looks), bootstrap makes the 'design' part easy, freeing me up to spend my time on other things. This is generally a big win.

Buzaga 15y ago

Websites and projects that are meant to be used by non-techies probably wouldn't regard this as an issue... of course since we are techies we notice at the first hit of the eye, but normal people? my guess is that it will take much a bigger part of the web using bootstrap and a lot of time for them to notice and start to care.... also, I really suck at design, I f*cking hate it, it takes me weeks to produce something acceptable even with bootstrap...what am I going to do?

Buzaga 15y ago
I mean, I can get annoyed looking at this bootstrap list too, I also believe the least that should be done is try to custom it a little so it doesn't look just like another bootstrap page... but again, webdesigning is a PAINFUL(and I mean it) thing for me to do...

Yxven 15y ago

The real problem is that web design is about 100x harder than it should be. I'm not saying there shouldn't be room for the artists to outshine the rest of us, but there's no excuse for why placing elements with css is so hard. Different browsers shouldn't have different names and syntax for the same features. The cascade makes it difficult to mix templates without adjusting a million different things. Bootstrap solves most of this. That is why it's becoming prevalent. The only way this trend will stop is a high-quality cross-browser WYSIWYG editor.

virtualeyes 15y ago

I agree with the OP, pretty spot on, while bootstrap sites look good, they generally all look the same. For CRUD/admin, yes, bootstrap is a definite go; for public front facing, not for my clients. Client identity should be based on a unique brand, and bootstrap, short of major tweaks, does not provide that. To umm, boot, boostrap is a wee bit on the heavy side for my liking (80KB css minified), and the javascript features are not mind blowing (for example, would prefer flyout menus like in Foundation or HTML Kickstart). I'm rolling with Skeleton and jquerytools (sadly behind the maintenance curve) on the front end. If bootstrap becomes themeable, I'll consider using on the front end, but until then, differentiation is king in my book.

bphogan 15y ago

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.

lr 15y ago

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 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!

YooLi 15y ago

"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." Get over yourself.

pacomerh 15y ago

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.

mfonda 15y ago

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.

user2459 15y ago

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.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

chromedude 15y ago

Have been wanting to write something like this for the past few months. Glad someone else did it. It is making me go crazy!

dwrowe 15y ago

I think the benefit of something like Bootstrap is getting an idea off the floor with _some_ nod towards aesthtics. If I can't afford a designer, I'm happy to use someones idea of a 'default' to get it to the point that it is functional, relatively easy on the eyes, etc. Then, when the funds / time is available focus on tweaking things to not appear like the bootstrap default.

erikabele 15y ago

Looks like most of the negative comments are from designers which totally makes sense; you're getting paid for coming up with neat little buttons and so on... but on the other hand, why didn't you designers come up with a good (open-source) framework for these things. Teach people, give them rope, enable them... oh, and there are already tools like bootswatch coming up. This is not the end, just the beginning for a sane design for the rest of us (aka the developers).

danneu 15y ago

I think this entire assertion has the wrong idea. This idea would be valid if the universal alternative to using Bootstrap is some impressive design stitched together by your in-house crack team of designers. But I'm sure the alternative to Bootstrap for most people is for the developer to use his own html/css know-how to construct something passable as he goes. So, for most people, I'd wager that Bootstrap is mostly just a time optimization that saves the developer from spending time on a design that would have been far less impressive anyways, that saves the developer from burning time that could be allocated to the actual product. I find it silly to condemn people for how they allocate their time. Even the whole pro-Bootstrap chorus of "But it's just a standard interface for the web" is silly. Really? I have yet to even stumble across a Bootstrap website in the wild that wasn't linked to from a Show HN. Are these monthly Bootstrap rants conflating the HN echo chamber with the internet? Weekend solo-dev projects with funded business websites? I guarantee it. The likening of Bootstrap to Wordpress' default theme is telling. Does anyone here really encounter WP's default theme in the wild? I sure don't. Maybe the majority of WP installs still have the default theme, but it's in the same way that the majority of WAMP installs still have the default "It Works!" Apache screen on localhost. I just don't get the point. If Bootstrap really was some prevalent interface that most of the web started using, then you guys that do have the crack team of designers at your disposal should be excited! Here's your chance to stand out! But I'm using Bootstrap because it's literally faster than any other alternative I can think of until I have someone separately working on a UI branch that I can merge into my code. If I took your advice and stopped using Bootstrap because you assume "I don't care enough" to make a custom design, I'd end up with something that will probably look worse and guaranteed to take much longer to create giving me more bottlenecks as I get hamstringed by aesthetics when I could instead be funneling my efforts into business logic and not into something that's rather trivial to switch out when my app is deployed and my time frees up to address less-critical concerns.

kisielk 15y ago

From the perspective of someone who frequents Hacker News then of course it's going to seem like there's a ton of sites using the nearly-stock bootstrap look. That's because people like us actually look at sites like "Built With Bootstrap" and check out people's demos of bootstrap sites. Back in the real world the average internet user will likely never notice. Most sites in the early stages will have few visitors and due to variety of interests it's unlikely that a single person will be using a large enough number of these sites to start realizing this problem. As the successful sites grow larger and move beyond the early stages it's likely the developers will have access to more resources to improve their site theme over time and move away from the bootstrap look.

JumpCrisscross 15y ago

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.

ebzlo 15y ago

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.

justinbaker 15y ago

Thanks for putting down Ruby on Rails developers everywhere. Comparing a DESIGN framework to an actual web framework, with much more actually to it is nonsensical. Beginners sure can use Rails. So can the experience programmer. The budding Rails developer still needs to learn concepts and programming skills to create his/her application. The use of a framework doesn't imply a programmer using it learns nothing. Now which is more likely? Someone creating a well programmed, secure website from scratch to "learn how to program", or to use a well tested, and proven framework? People don't use Rails to simply "learn how to program". You are completely missing this.

joedev 15y ago

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.