>Don’t be “just another Twitter Bootstrap site”<p>I find these criticisms regarding the ability to recognize a "Twitter Bootstrap site" to be inconsiderate of the audience for which the sites were really created.<p>Generally speaking, the startup development community exposes themselves to new websites on a pretty frequent basis. Just because <i>we</i> can recognize a particular CSS framework, doesn't mean the <i>intended audience</i> of the website can.<p>I would be surprised if it wasn't an <i>extremely</i> small percentage of website users that would be able to recognize "just another Twitter Bootstrap site."<p>Don't let yourself get caught up in the bubble of the ever-critical development community. If you're building a site just to please folks within that community, you should probably do a bit more research on who you really want your target demographic to be.
>Come on. “Half-decent”. Is this what you want to output? To be known for? I can’t understand why, if you have an ounce of pride, you’d not want everything you release to be the best you could do?<p>This is all a little uppity coming from a blog using the Svbtle theme.
The universal reaction I get to any standard bootstrap web site I show to people is "this looks awesome, great work". Nobody outside of the web dev community knows or cares what Bootstrap is.<p>I hate Windows, iPhone, Android, OSX and Linux apps that try too hard to look and behave "different". Much of the hate for flash was because that was the standard tool people reached for when they wanted to make their sites fancy and different. I think we'd all be a lot better off if more sites used Bootstrap rather than less.
If your site's content is any good, half-decent is more than enough for the design. As a reader, bootstrap is the best thing to happen to the web in ten years - thousands of sites now have a simple, clean, usable theme, letting me focus on what's actually important - the content.
> I can’t understand why, if you have an ounce of pride, you’d not want everything you release to be the best you could do?<p>Seriously? You never release anything until you cannot think of a single improvement? Everything is time-constrained, and some of us would rather spend no time or attention at all on how things look, if only we could get away with that. Since we can't, we'd like to put something acceptable with the smallest time investment possible. The technical term appears to be "half-decent". :)
This criticism only makes sense in the bubble of developers - no one else gives a rat's ass nor notices.<p>As such, maybe use Bootstrap when designing for a general audience, but consider going in a different direction, when your audience is developers? Because they - and only they - seem to get their knickers in a twist when you use Bootstrap.
<i>Well, you could have made the greatest plugin, web application or library in the world but the moment you slap Twitter Bootstrap on your site for it, all initial value is lost and people just see a “cookie cutter website”.</i><p>I disagree. Bootstrap is there precisely for the people that do not wish to spend their effort on re-implementing reasonable web design techniques, yet wish their website to look "good". Sure, if you're selling yourself as a web-design expert you'd want to either completely customise it or make your own, but I did not get the impression you were restricting your comments to those.<p>Perhaps you're aiming your criticism at a completely different type of person, but I'd be interested in your critique (or otherwise) of these two, who clearly did not go the extra mile, and have not even used Bootstrap:<p><a href="http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/" rel="nofollow">http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/</a> (seems to be down atm, as does Google's cache... <a href="http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=knuth&d=4602526515724737&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=f1G7FY7kBi8s_Jhhmjsads2I5qKWucNV" rel="nofollow">http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=knuth&d=460252651572473...</a> )<p><a href="http://norvig.com/" rel="nofollow">http://norvig.com/</a>
It must be nice to have a designer in your back pocket willing to drop everything and design a flashy landing page for every tiny (~40 lines of JS) pet project you do. This is snobbery at its finest.<p>This isn't a product you need to sell. It's a tool that people either need or don't. And if they need it then the GitHub readme will probably suffice.<p>I know the author has a valid point in there somewhere but this is a terrible example. Don't make developers feel like they should be ashamed to release anything until they've paid a designer to slap Kanye West on it.
> people just see a “cookie cutter website”.<p>For values of "people" equal to "people who closely follow and are knowledgeable about web site design trends". For a site like LiberWriter, that's probably about 1% of our customers.<p>The others see a better site than I would have done on my own.
Dude, seriously? Sorry, but no. I am a crummy web designer; as a matter of fact, I have only a very minimal interest in browser programming, period.<p>I am not interested in spending weeks and weeks learning how to do quality web design, nor am I interested in spending weeks and weeks learning Javascript <i>just</i> so I can make something Not Bootstrap that looks about as good.<p>The goal of my (barely used) websites is to look clean and present the requisite information. Not going to lie, they look horribly cookie-cutter, and I could change that. But it <i>doesn't matter</i> (at least today). If it mattered, I'd change it.
I guess I should feel ripped off by Nissan since I have a cookie cutter SUV. 4 wheels, the trunk has a 3rd row that pops up on demand, I can switch into 4 wheel drive. I did get to pick the color though. I really wish they had thought about making it unique and maybe putting the steering wheel in the back seat.
<i>If you’ve made a great product and you can’t design, find a designer, there is a deluge of designers out there looking for a collaboration.</i><p>That assumes that you're making a product that designers will be interested in. Maybe it's just a crud app for doing finance stuff, or any number of utilitarian apps. And if it's a non-flashy open source project (projects geared towards designers don't count) then chances are slim that you'll find a designer willing to work with you on it. Design also has a very different collaborative model than development. You can't just have tens of random designers drop by and contribute patches.<p>I think Bootstrap is a net win for the web because it raises the baseline. If Bootstrap didn't exist, would all of those developers instead become/hired designers?
I get stick from designers and developers (mainly on Twitter) for using Bootstrap. I'm not a designer, I'm not creative enough to be one, but I can recognize a good design. I personally use Bootstrap because it enables me to very quickly come up with an application which is usable and VERY easily maintainable. From there I'm able to change the colours, layout tends to be grid based for the things I work on.<p>Why should I suffer attempting to design something that I know 100% will be classed shit, when I can use Bootstrap, a decent base look and colour scheme.<p>"Just ship!" is something I hear all the time. The app works and it's useable what else matters?
I'm not a fan of using bootstrap for client facing content.<p>We have specific front-end designers & css/markup developers for "front of house", but for "Admin" sections - i.e. the backend that staff/etc will use to manage an app/site/etc - something like Bootstrap (i'm interested to try Zurb Foundation/similar for this role too) is perfect, because we aren't trying to sell a brand to those users, we're trying to deliver functionality, and it's nice to be able to just put pre-built components together and get functional dashboards, record lists, CRUD screens, etc.
> I’ve never read a more half assed title - “How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour”. Come on. “Half-decent”. Is this what you want to output?<p>Some people are not designers; they want to code and are in need for a tool that's like boilerplate, like something, that they can quickly grab so that they can start to actually code; a bootstrap! A tool that allows to create temporary, but working and good looking design in minutes.<p>I'm happy we have such tool; it is very useful!
Maybe an analogy can be drawn here to popular music. You run into a lot of people that say they don't listen to it, and some who say it's crammed down our throats by radio stations giving listeners no choice, but at the end of the day it's still popular and changes our global culture. As much as I sometimes don't like to admit it, but, the trend is your friend.
A lot of people give Twitter Bootstrap crap because everyone is using the design and they get sick of seeing the design on every website. A lot of people miss the whole point of Twitter Bootstrap. It's a design guide, it's for people to quickly create a website. It doesn't mean it's finished after that.<p>I think people shouldn't blame Twitter Bootstrap, but the people that are using Twitter Bootstrap. They shouldn't stop with styling and design after Twitter Bootstrap is implemented. They should make the design their own.<p>Note: I'm one of those people. Sometimes I make a design with Twitter Bootstrap at it's core, and not change the styling of the input fields etcetera to make the design not look like Twitter Bootstrap. But that's MY fault, not the creators of Twitter Bootstrap.
> “Half-decent”. Is this what you want to output? To be known for? I can’t understand why, if you have an ounce of pride, you’d not want everything you release to be the best you could do?<p>Sometimes the software is a means to an end. I've made small utility web apps for clients before, and throwing Bootstrap in improves the experience of the site without taking more than a few minutes of time (which the client pays for). Spending time customizing Bootstrap or designing from scratch gets in to diminishing returns almost immediately, while that first quick step from 1994-style to Bootstrap pays off big.<p>Pride is one thing, but when it's somebody else's money you have to consider hubris too.
I love to use Bootstrap for backends and purely utilitarian websites such as monitoring/dashboard sites, admin-interfaces to whatever etc. It allows me to quickly build a decent looking and usable interface without spending much time on design decisions. I'd be more careful to use it on sites that try to promote brands, but there it's still a good layout grid that easily adapts to styling, so there's little harm in using it. Now if you want to go all crazy with your design, then Bootstrap is probably not what you want to use.<p>TL;DR: Use it where appropriate. Misuse is not Bootstraps fault.
There is a lot of emotion here but nobody seems to have hit on the major pain point of Bootstrap. It is great for a quick prototype but if you want to do anything that deviates from the Bootstrap styles it creates an unmaintainable disaster. What would be minor CSS changes becomes significantly more time-consuming or impossible. Any small amount of time saved in the initial development is quickly lost. Using Bootstap is the worst kind of technical debt your application could be afflicted with.
I agree that visual identity is important and it's better to have a custom design to stand out from the crowd, but one thing you haven't mentioned are Bootstrap themes - there is already a wide variety of themes to choose from and most of them change the look&feel of Bootstrap drastically. I think it's a fair compromise between having to create custom design (which can be time consuming) and using default Bootstrap theme (which is overused and doesn't stand out).
This is such a silly argument. When you're building an application, your intended audience cares about whether or not it does X that it says it will. Up next in importance is how cheap it is, and in a distant third is how easy it is to use. That the layout and buttons are easily recognizable from other sites is a boon, if anything, as it increases the feeling of familiarity.
bootstrap is excellent for developers that aren't designers, and still want to put together something that looks nice without having to spend money on elaborate designs. not all startups are blessed with loads of money.