

Ask HN: How bad does Bootstrap look on a production site? - RaphiePS

I'm a backend guy starting his first foray into building the frontend for a consumer webapp.<p>However, I have next to no design skills and Bootstrap makes a lot of sense to me (ease of use, relatively nice-looking).<p>Does a Bootstrapped site look sketchy to you? If so, any recommendations for a more legit-looking framework? Thanks!
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Goopplesoft
Consider it a solid base to build on thats fairly easy to skin later on. As a
developer who hates design, I gotta say bootstrap was my kick into liking
design. One major tip: put patience in design, dont expect things to happen in
5 minutes do lots of experimentation and tinkering. Also try to get into less
css.

Some resources:

<http://ajkochanowicz.github.com/Kickstrap/>

<https://wrapbootstrap.com/>

<http://bootswatch.com/>

<http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/>

<http://jetstrap.com/>

<http://www.boottheme.com/>

[http://designshack.net/articles/css/20-awesome-resources-
for...](http://designshack.net/articles/css/20-awesome-resources-for-twitter-
bootstrap-lovers/)

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midibite
Can this be deployed with Wordpress?

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santa_boy
I am not a designer so perhaps can relate to you question. I think Bootstrap
is a great choice for non-designers who basically want to hack a usable and
reliable design. Bootstrap has great advantages to designing a site / webapp
that is usable and functional. Much of the design has been well vetted for
cross browsers and bugs have been fixed to a great degree.

There are lots of resources available as in the comments to customize
bootstrap so that it can achieve a reasonable degree of distinction (vs. the
default template).

You will find some great themes that you could mimic to almost have no
"traditional" bootstrap trace left in the initial UI experience.

Also, once you get used to Bootstrap you are not going to have to relearn the
semantics to get your design out. You can focus more on customizations and the
core of your webapp.

I've compiled a huge list of Bootstrap resources over the past year (as
mentioned in the other comments). I hope to put another "directory" out
shortly.

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trapexit
Don't waste any time or money whatsoever on a custom design until you have
validated your app idea by getting people to pay you money for it.

Even if you are building an app for hackers / designers who are familiar with
Bootstrap and might balk at something being "Bootstrappy", your first
customers are going to realize that it's just a beta site.

If you are building for any other market, you may _never_ need to bother
customizing your design. Out-of-the-box Bootstrap looks better than 99% of the
niche software out there.

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joshuacc
A raw bootstrap site doesn't look sketchy, just a little undesigned. Depending
on your audience, this may be perfectly fine.

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palidanx
We are using bootstrap, and skin it using

<http://bootswatch.com/>

As orangethirty wrote, you can get a css developer to skin the entire thing.

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orangethirty
Bootstrap is a framework and not a _look_. I suggest you hire a designed who
may help you build a good looking front end while using bootstrap to deal with
cross-browser issues and grids.

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minimaxir
_Don't use the default CSS styles._ Make it your own brand.

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rtcoms
You can get bootstrap themes from <https://wrapbootstrap.com/> as per your
requirements

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grumps
Not sure about them. I bought a "bootstrap" css from them, completely
worthless. I would have to re-work all the html because they extended most of
the base into their own abstraction. tl;dr - the implementation I bought
didn't use bootstrap.

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codyguy
Double click and edit bootstrap templates:

<http://www.bootui.com/>

