
Great, Another Bootstrap Site - alecperkins
http://drawar.com/d/great-another-bootstrap-site/
======
carsongross
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.

~~~
kingsidharth
> Bootstrap gives us a sane, standard look and feel for the web, which is a
> good thing.

NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are
supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook
and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space .
Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same.

I can't remember name of one site that was made with Bootstrap. because there
is nothing special,visually, to remember. No visual cue.

> Developers can focus on developing applications that are functional and
> usable, rather than tweaking CSS to make things "look right".

That's cool if you are building for just developers. But when it comes to non-
devs, you don't want to confuse them, visually, with some other website.
Remember, for many Facebook is a that "blue" site. With so many people taking
bootstrap as it is, it's going to be... un-special.

I remember my friend discovering facebook themed Tumblr theme. People actually
confused it with facebook and made comments like

"Why can't I update my status?"

"Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my fb?"

..

Also, the author is not saying Bootstrap is bad. In fact, it's good that you
can focus on dev and have good defaults on CSS and design. But leaving it
there is BAD. (read above, why). Take it forward.

Quick Fix: Don't use the Bootstrap top bar. Seriously, that's one major shift.

\- Another Pissed at Bootstrap websites Designer

~~~
jonknee
And yet Facebook, Twitter and Google all have a nearly identical top bar
(sorry, Facebook's is blue). They have billions of page views to analyze and
have all come to the same conclusion.

> NO. It is NOT a good thing. When it comes to visual design, things are
> supposed to look different. Twitter is meant to look different than Facebook
> and facebook should not look like Amazon. That's how you create mind-space .
> Bootstrap kills that - they all just look the same.

It depends on your goal. If you want to make an application that people use
all day, having a unique UI is probably not a win. If you used Netscape back
in the day you can use Chrome today and not have trouble. Consistency itself
can be beautiful.

If you're making a marketing site, then your designer can go wild (as long as
everything is being tested for effectiveness).

~~~
kingsidharth
They are not. It's not just the colors but the visual style. They are
different for all three. Conclusion is > have a top bar .. with distinct
visual style.

> If you want to make an application that people use all day, having a unique
> UI is probably not a win.

Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should
look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your
site with someone else's.

>Consistency itself can be beautiful.

Yes, same with search engines, if you used Google you can use Yahoo. But still
their visual design is different in many ways if not search result. You can
tell Yahoo from Google but not two Bootstrap sites.

Consistency is good for usability. Again, Button should look like a button,
but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone
else's.

~~~
barranger
>Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should
look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your
site with someone else's.

If you are relying on the style of your buttons to distinguish your site from
all the others, perhaps you should be spending more time on building out the
content/functionality of your site.

I often find that designers are more worried about how a site will look in a
portfolio than whether the end users will get anything out of the site.

------
bradleyland
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
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
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.

------
kisielk
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.

------
avolcano
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/> 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
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
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
That is the way the Internet works.

1\. Product, hardware or software, gains the hearts and minds of hackers
everywhere. 2\. Backlash.

------
va_coder
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
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
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.

------
danneu
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.

------
aaronpk
OTOH, you end up with stuff like this without it ;)

<http://i.imgur.com/S5JPD.png>

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

------
mckoss
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.

------
quellhorst
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
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."

------
helipad
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.

------
lr
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>

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!

------
s3b
If you're looking for easy ways to customize it, have a look at
<http://stylebootstrap.info/> . This was on HN recently.

~~~
praxeologist
More here too: [http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/20-beautiful-resources-
that...](http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/20-beautiful-resources-that-
complement-twitter-bootstrap/)

------
jonknee
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.

------
danso
The OP links to this site: <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
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/>

3- Special font for your branding/ H tags, boom
(<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
Yessssss. SWIM should make a bootstrap theme builder with these in mind!

------
shykes
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.

------
nirvdrum
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.

------
jamiequint
'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.

------
latchkey
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/> 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.

------
goldvine
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.

------
hemancuso
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.

------
YooLi
_"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.

------
justjimmy
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/> 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'.

------
JumpCrisscross
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.

------
tmcw
/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.

------
tomjen3
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.

------
virtualeyes
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.

------
gregorymichael
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.

------
bphogan
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.

------
phatbyte
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.

------
timbowhite
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/> 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.

------
Yxven
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.

------
j45
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).

------
erikabele
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).

------
joedev
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.

------
ebzlo
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.

------
dwrowe
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.

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pacomerh
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.

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methodin
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.

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mfonda
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.

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

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

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nileshtrivedi
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>

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weixiyen
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.

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wanderful
Ironically, the author appears to borrow quite heavily from Dustin Curtis:

Layout: <http://dcurt.is/>

Transparent border: <http://blog.dustincurtis.com/the-dcurtis-manifesto>

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

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

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

~~~
alecperkins
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.

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

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Buzaga
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
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...

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user2459
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.

