Goodbye Yahoo, Hello Bootstrap and Backbone. | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye Yahoo, Hello Bootstrap and Backbone.

company.unscatter.com

42 pointsjrussbowman22 comments

Sorry, but your site has serious problems. Just adding Bootstrap without any knowledge of at least some basic designs does you no good.

For example:

* The text is wider than the screen and the scrolling destroys the readability of the text. Even when it would fit the screen, it makes a terrible reading experience

* Apply paddings to the left and right edge of the screen. If the text touches the browser window, it looks ugly and removes focus and call to action on it.

As a final advice: get yourself a copy of Design for Hackers ( http://bitboxer.de/2012/02/05/design-for-hackers-reverse-eng... )

Thank you for the advice and the link.

If you don't mind can you tell me what browser you viewed the page and resolution? I don't have the problem of the text being larger than the screen but I also tend to use high resolution screens and my browser width is usually greater than 1000 pixels.

I also admittedly haven't been keeping up with internet explorer or opera testing. Actually, I don't even have a windows desktop available to me at the moment.

Hey, thanks for recommending Design for Hackers! (I'm the author)

Perhaps you should stop using Apple products as well since Apple is quite heavy on patent litigation.

It seems everyone is saying hello to bootstrap. Too bad very few build anything memorable upon it.

That just reflects it's status as the de-facto starting point. You could equally state that it's too bad that very few build anything memorable with HTML.

Well yes, a starting point - but not also the ending point at the same time.

And by memorable I meant based on bootstrap but with own "personality", not bootstrap's.

How much of a site's personality would you consider is design, vs content and UX? I'm considering tweaking the over all colors and such for unscatter.com and chatfor.us (when I move chatfor.us to bootstrap) in order to differentiate them. I just haven't put a large focus on that, choosing to focus more on the functionality of the sites.

I guess my opinion is Bootstrap is a great way to have an acceptable looking front end while you focus on building out your minimum feature set.

Also, your customers won't know or care that you are using bootstrap unless they are graphic designers.

I think you're missing the point of Bootstrap. It's meant to keep your site looking nice while you bootstrap it; to avoid doing a ton of graphic design work before you even have a working prototype. Once you're able to spend money on graphic design, you probably won't be using Bootstrap.

This is the point that the haters are missing. We're using a heavily modified bootstrap with backbone, and it has dramatically decreased our turnaround for new UI features. Other than the button styles, you can't really tell it's there. To me, bootstrap is CSS boilerplate that is clever and thoroughly tested, so you know when you copy a component or a design pattern from it, chances are it will Just Work. Creating customer-facing sites from 100% vanilla bootstrap isn't ideal unless you are building an MVP or some administration panel where a custom design wouldn't necessarily improve the user experience. It also really raises the lowest common denominator for teams that can't afford a lot of design work. I think bootstrap has been a great boon to web UI in general, and I am looking forward to seeing it evolve and inspire other frameworks in the future.

Though I don't use their site I think https://kippt.com/ did a pretty good job at making bootstrap their own (though you can't really tell the good ones are done in bootstrap)

Planscope has a great design out of the Twitter Bootstrap: https://planscope.io/

And we're using Backbone!

My site is pretty cool though:

http://in.5thvillage.com/ http://www.5thvillage.com/

I am using bootstrap, it is good for a developer like me who doesn't know design very well....

looks cool. but there is no way to give feedback or contact.

:P oh yes, i miss that... will add one soon..

Don't bother clicking on the above site, is some kinda spam link

http://twitter.com is a nice example of bootstrap of course ;)

fwiw, on my laptop screen the search box for this blog is straight below the tumblr buttons, you may want to fix that http://imgur.com/8i4uG

Thank you for the feedback. I think I'll also have to see about making it easier for people to get feedback to me as well. Guess I'm going from personal hobby to trying to at least support users best I can.

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