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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

One thing that strikes me as odd is that there seems to be two camps in startup design;

1. Use Bootstrap and don't do much customisation, thus making something that looks a lot like a Bootstrap demo site.

2. Don't use Bootstrap because all Bootstrap sites look the same.

There's a third path - use Bootstrap, but only as a foundation. Customise it. Bootstrap can be used to underpin really good design work. You only need to spend 5 minutes on https://wrapbootstrap.com/ to see some things that really don't look 'bootstrappy' but still have all the advantages of a well tested, well understood toolkit.

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>>There's a third path - use Bootstrap, but only as a foundation. Customise it.

I did this and gave up fairly quickly. The amount of time I was spending adding and removing code was brain numbing. I'd start with it as a prototype, completely stripped down. Soon my clients where asking for things Bootstrap couldn't handle, or didn't come "Stock" as they say. Now I have a foundation (Bootstrap) which needs heavy modification and soon, it's completely bloated.

I decided to just start with a robust set of media queries and then build my site from there. I can control the code, the UI/UX and pick and choose which plugins or design patterns I want to use. For me, this has been the best option. Does it take a little longer? Sure, but in the end, I control all the code and can pivot and modify the code a lot faster to suit my clients. It also saves time having to dig through oodles of documentation to try and find out if some functionality my client requested is supported by Bootstrap and how to implement it.

You can control all the code in Bootstrap. Download it, edit the hell out of it. That's not really an advantage of rolling your own.

Does it take a little longer? Sure, but in the end, I control all the code and can pivot and modify the code a lot faster to suit my clients.

You can modify your own code faster to start with, but really that's just because you haven't learned Bootstrap. Once you know it well it's no harder than changing your own code.

It also saves time having to dig through oodles of documentation to try and find out if some functionality my client requested is supported by Bootstrap and how to implement it.

Digging through Bootstrap's documentation is pretty much always going to be faster than writing your own code.

Building something in-house is very, very rarely a better option than spending time learning something that tens of thousands of people use every day. You simply can't test your own code to the breadth and depth that the community goes to with Bootstrap. This is the same reason why we don't all roll our own jQuery equivalent or SASS compiler. Open source's big advantage is that it's a collective effort that we can all freely build upon.

Lastly, one massive advantage of Bootstrap is that other people know it. Once you get to the point where you're working on projects that need more than one front end developer that is a huge advantage over an in-house library because all the advantages you see for your own code the other developers will see for theirs.

Agreed. This article is a good example of #2 when they reference the cartoon that shows the developer using default bootstrap style. Being lazy with Bootstrap does not make Bootstrap itself a bad thing.

It's also worth noting that sites only look "bootstrappy" to developers. Among the general public and user base, they just want a site that looks decent enough and functions well across devices, which is what bootstrap offers.

This is, however, very much a follow the leader industry, where the purportedly innovative designs are all follow the leader. Right now the trend is overwhelmingly for the overloaded scroll, the images that fade in on scroll in, the fixed back images, the hero board (a lot of these came into parlance via the NY Times Snow special feature which was quite innovative at the time. Similar to how AJAX gained broad awareness with Google suggests). These are absolutely cliche at this point, but it is held as the high point of design. In two years it will look positively beginner.

> It's also worth noting that sites only look "bootstrappy" to developers. Among the general public and user base, they just want a site that looks decent enough and functions well across devices, which is what bootstrap offers.

This is the key point: it's all about your users. Most people out there in the real world just want something that looks decent and works reasonably well. They don't know and don't care whether your site was made with Bootstrap or uses Erlang or whatever.

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