
Hey Look, It's Every Bootstrap Website Ever - tangue
http://adventurega.me/bootstrap/
======
KZeillmann
Maybe it's because I'm not a front-end developer, but I fail to see the issue
here. Besides the weird scrolling.

As a backend dev, I enjoy the ease with which I can set up a Bootstrap site on
my side projects. I'm not good at CSS, so I'll use a Bootstrap theme. It'll
make things look all right, and I can focus on content and making the backend
work. Later I can return to the styling.

I don't think every site needs to be wholly new and incredibly imaginative. In
fact, the uniformity makes it easier for me to process the content.

Bootstrap is great for, well, bootstrapping. Should it be your final CSS when
you've had a lot of time to think about your design? I dunno. But I feel that
the hate is unwarranted.

~~~
kyriakos
Totally agree with you. Not every site needs to be a work of art, First it
needs to be functional and have a good user experience and bootstrap helps a
bit with the latter.

I actually find over-designed sites harder to use.

~~~
sevilo
Agreed, us as programmers often like to consider things good if they're
technically challenging and creative, but we're so blind to worlds outside of
programming that we don't see the real purposes of things like these websites.
Surprisingly some of the highest converting pages have the ugliest designs you
can imagine, just because they're functional and only do what they're meant to
do.

------
jaredklewis
I don't see how the uniformity of sites using bootstrap is such a terrible
thing.

If we were discussing desktop applications, would you want every application
to have it's own set of buttons, dialogs, modals, and UI conventions? All with
different color schemes?

Uniformity comes at the expense of design originality, obviously. But it also
comes with the benefit of familiarity, which makes it easier for all users to
get the information they need or perform the task they came to do, which is
usually more important that originality.

~~~
ommunist
You talking communism and evangelising standardisation in the field of art and
craft. Imagine all books paperback, is that ok?

~~~
misogyny101
Everything can be art, but not everything has to be. I like that every site
looks the same because it is a familiar environment and I can focus on doing
things.

You're overreacting tho. standardization has nothing to do with communism.

~~~
ommunist
As a front end practitioner, I must defend my point. Otherwise there will be
no jobs for me around, everyone will be happy focusing on their tasks. But
what to do. Books once had nice initial letters which were difficult to read,
but looked great and were object of meditation per se. Over the centuries
books became utility, and now you can rarely see even a drop cap, not to say
elaborate title glyph. The same appears in the websites look and feel, with
greater speed. Although you may be right when you apply your point to the web
app, but I completely disagree when we are talking about the visual identity.
Identities should never be bootstrapped. And yes, standardisation was one of
the pillars of the communism. If you look into the history, you shall see who
was the longest seating chairman of the ISO.

~~~
drdeca
Let people act similarly if they want to, and differently if they want to.
What's the problem? It is not as if people are forbidden from putting fancy
graphics at the start of their texts, and, some do? I mean, not as fancy,
sure, but there is nothing stopping someone from making an individual copy of
a book like that, and, if there was cause to, it could be mass produced.

I mean also the printing things are probably not designed to have like, shiny
inks and such, so with mass producing books, its harder to do the unique
printing of the first character, but if /could/ be done. Just, no one wants to
badly enough.

Its the free market.

Personally, I prefer even simpler sites than this one, for the most part.
(Unless the site does something, I'm not sure I think that js is really needed
at all, unless you want an analytics thing.)

That is, unless the other things on the site are the point of the site, in
which case of course more stuff is nice.

I don't think its true that preferring a simpler format for the information is
necessarily a preference for a lack of aesthetics, but rather a different
aesthetic preference.

You know the general way that webpages of students on university websites
often look?

At addresses like cs.schoolwebsite.edu/~JRandom/index.html ?

Usually a blank white background, black text, a bit of formatting, but not
very much, works fine on pretty much any browser you could think of?

I think there is a specific aesthetic to these sorts of pages, and I
personally appreciate that aesthetic.

I don't think that that aesthetic should be considered to be an illegitimate
aesthetic choice.

------
manyxcxi
I love it. If you're offended by this, you take life way too damn seriously.

I use a lot of bootstrap for internal web apps so that I can spend nearly zero
time on thinking about the UI/layout and all my time just gettin the damn tool
built.

If it's public facing I rarely use Bootstrap- but good lord Bootstrap is handy
for getting a UI on something quickly or for prototyping a layout.

~~~
kbenson
That's exactly how I use Bootstrap, and 2.3.2 at that, since it's too much of
a waste of time to upgrade what just works already. I get a not dog-ugly app
with easy directions on how to implement 99% of what I want to accomplish and
I don't have to spend 12 hours twiddling CSS for a design that I think is
barely passable and everyone else thinks looks like crap, which allows me to
focus on features? _Sold_.

~~~
karlshea
Same here. It's really really nice for administrative interfaces: forms,
buttons, table grids, error states, labels, etc.

Everything looks good and the people that actually have to use it don't even
know what "Bootstrap" is, but they aren't looking at the result of a
programmer doing a half-assed job styling something only 10 people will ever
see.

------
arbre
I was wondering what was the template behind all these similar designs. Today
I learned. I really like that template and I love the idea that one can build
a beautiful website with little effort. Why reinventing the wheel?

~~~
Niksko
I agree with you. It's a pretty, modern looking template that suits a variety
of products.

Good design is hard, and good designers are expensive. Wouldn't you rather
have the default design be a good one, instead of paying shitty designers to
make shitty designs and use that as the default look for the web?

~~~
taneq
I'd rather the default design have some actual damn information rather than a
few vague feelgood phrases and some unrelated stock photos. Bonus points if
they don't make me watch a 5 minute video full of exciting music and artsy
slow-mo footage of "cloth sliding off a thing" or "people laughing in a park"
and still give me no idea what their stupid product actually does.

I know this is a gripe about the content rather than the presentation, but
seriously, so many websites based on this kind of template are a total waste
of my time and attention.

------
Uptrenda
Modifying templates is actually surprisingly difficult - not technically
difficult but just because its so hard to make the changes look as good as the
original. Often it seems to me that -only- the original text or images will
work with the template as changing any of the contents throws off the
alignment, color balance, typography, etc for everything else. For example -
the template that the OP is ranting about looks terrible because he used far
too much text in most of the sections. Unfortunately, 99.9% of templates can't
actually be modified by non-designers since there seems to be no combination
of changes that will look good. On that note: the design that OP is using is
actually the only template I've ever gotten to work with my own content (I
stay away from web design for this reason) so maybe the problem is an
abundance of poor designs that are too brittle to modify by non-designers?

------
dan1234
I'd say this less a Bootstrap problem and more of a 'every site based on a
cheap theme' ever.

Sometimes clients are unwilling to pay for real design and see more value in
that $20 theme forest theme, especially with cheap Wordpress sites being
turned around in a day or two.

~~~
enraged_camel
It's not about being unwilling to pay for real design. You have to realize
that most clients who buy these themes are getting a serious upgrade from
their 1990s-era websites with table layouts and basic inline styling. So if a
cheap theme can provide such amazing value, at that point the value a real
designer can provide becomes marginal in comparison.

~~~
manyxcxi
> It's not about being unwilling to pay for real design.

Nailed it. If I've got a client who has only $10K to spend and I know that I
can deliver all of the functionality and a pleasant Bootstrap theme within the
budget, then I'm doing the client a disservice not to make that an option. Not
only that, even if it's not a theme, but just 'raw' Bootstrap, I'm jumping way
ahead and reducing a lot of the browser/window size bugs I'd run into by
starting from scratch with the CSS.

Now- if the client was coming to me and the focus was on the design, then I'd
be ripping them off if I shoveled some rehashed Bootstrap theme over the fence
and called it magic.

I can understand a lot of arguments against it, but I'm still okay with
starting your design with Bootstrap CSS for their grids and such. Granted, you
could get a lot smaller/more performant grid frameworks, but I wouldn't
chastise someone for starting with it.

------
IvyMike
He forgot to break the Back button.

~~~
yelnatz
How come this didn't highjack my scrollbar?

------
mchahn
I did an ugly UI for a mobile app I did for personal home use. My daughter
said "Haven't you heard of Bootstrap?". This is getting insane.

~~~
gotofritz
Listen to the youth. There is wisdom in what she says.

------
carsongross
Do you remember what the Internet looked like before bootstrap?

I do.

I'll take it.

~~~
barbs
I think it looked just fine.

[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

~~~
mattl
Also
[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

~~~
vortico
I actually disagree with this "improvement" in all but one of seven of his CSS
declarations. The default font size, the pure black on pure white, line
height, and default margins are all fine in default plain HTML pages. However,
since computer screens have increased in width since the first web pages were
designed, I've added this user style to all pages I visit.

    
    
        p { max-width: 50em; }
    

I challenge everyone to go for an entire day with CSS disabled (View -> Page
Style -> No Style on Firefox). It will help your design skills if you are a
designer.

------
pauloday
This is hilarious, everyone who's taking it as a call to stop using this
template is taking it too seriously imo. It seems more like good natured
ribbing - he's right that these Bootstrap sites tend to look very same-y, but
as he says at the bottom "this template does look really nice, though".
There's nothing wrong with using the same template everyone else uses
(everyone probably uses it for a reason, after all), but there's also nothing
wrong with pointing out that all these sites tend to look the same because of
it.

------
allending
Where is the parallax effect?

------
Radim
Looks quite nice, at a glance. What am I missing?

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Seems a vast amount of new, tech websites look identical to this one as it was
a bootstrap template. So it's making fun of those who use the same template,
tweak a few things and boom it's a "super awesome website that we worked hard
on".

Bootstrap has its uses. Being non-creative and using the same template over
and over like everyone else just comes off as unimaginative.

~~~
bottled_poe
> "making fun"

Like this? "Ha ha, you chose the most cost effective web-design option. What a
dummy you are."

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Hey I never said it wasn't cost effective just unimaginative :). Not everyone
has the time nor money to be more imaginative than a default and there is
absolutely nothing wrong with that nor is it even needed all of the time.

------
adamkochanowicz
Thank you for including the picture of the laptop and phone. Why it's
important for people to show pictures of this in their website has always
confused me.

------
uzyn
The problem is not so much Bootstrap, or the template, but the bullcrap that
many of these landing pages loaded with just because the template that the
designer got has all these placeholders they they have got to replace with.

~~~
manyxcxi
Or the dozen or more JS libs and jQuery plugins that are loaded, but never
actually used because they started with a kitchen sink template.

------
andirk
Bootstrap is simply the new look of that old table-based 90's web design (
[http://www.foopee.com/punk/the-list/](http://www.foopee.com/punk/the-list/) ,
[https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/) ).
Replace drop shadows and glossy buttons with SVG icons, and your Comic Sans
with Helvetica Nueueue. And replace your guestbook with a complete lack of
interaction with your visitors.

~~~
jrapdx3
> Bootstrap is simply the new look of that old table-based 90's web design ...

That's an interesting thought, probably not far from the idea I've had that
the ubiquitous "modern" sites will all look dated in a year or two. Fashion is
so fickle.

But the real issue is how information sparse and resource intensive these
template-driven sites are. The spare craigslist site is arguably quite suited
to its purpose, and compact enough that visitors aren't required to navigate
far and wide to find what they're looking for.

Can't disagree with the many comments here that designing an attractive and
functional website is very hard, but personally I'd rather see a "plain" but
useful site vs. a pointlessly overdecorated "landing page" that tells little
about the product or service I went to the site to find.

Like any other task or project, quality and effectiveness of the website
results reflect the thought and effort put in to it. Kind of weird quoting
Spinoza in this context, but this thought of his seems to fit: "All things
excellent are as difficult as they are rare."

------
nsxwolf
These days if you spend 5 figures on a custom web design it's probably going
to be perceived as amateurish by all the users conditioned on standard looking
Bootstrap templates.

------
cperciva
People laugh at the Tarsnap website, but when I see sites like this I'm glad I
didn't succumb to the pressure to adopt a "modern" design.

~~~
aparadja
Just as an anecdote: I certainly don't _laugh_ at the Tarsnap website, but it
immediately turns me away as a potential customer. The instant gut feeling is
"OK, this is a product made by someone who laughs at UI design. They didn't
even _try_. The product will probably be a pain to learn."

It's most likely not an _accurate_ description of Tarsnap, but its's a strong
enough first impression that I'll immediately close the tab.

And that's a shame, a mutual loss for Tarsnap and any potential customers.
Tarsnap pops up on Hacker News quite a bit, so it probably is much better than
the impression it gives.

Design certainly isn't a binary choice between adopting fads and abandoning
aesthetics completely. The overused styles are overused because they are
viable first steps towards a _decent_ design. The cop-out alternative--taking
no step at all--isn't better.

------
enraged_camel
The problem as I see it is not that templates like these are all over the web
now and therefore look generic, but rather their designs tend to encourage
very shallow messaging on the website. Take the four icons displayed in the
middle for example. Most websites have them, and almost none of them say
anything of meaning or value. It's just marketing slogans and sound-bytes.

------
CM30
Reminds me of the picture in this article:

[http://www.novolume.co.uk/blog/all-websites-look-the-
same/](http://www.novolume.co.uk/blog/all-websites-look-the-same/)

Except you know, this one has four columns rather than three.

Really though, I think people are being a bit unfair on Bootstrap with these
criticisms. I mean sure, it makes it easy to make yet another cookie cutter
website with the same layout (as a lot of startups have found out), but you
can also do some really impressive stuff with the framework if you think
outside the box for half a second.

And hey, this template does work for a fair few startups and 'service'
companies. Not all of them, but a decent amount of the Silicon Valley type
anyway. Why reinvent the wheel for yet another generic company that's probably
not going to last six months?

------
vvpan
The biggest problem with those websites is not that they look the same, but
they are all equally bad. 95% of the time they barely contain any useful
information and are just 4-5 pages of images icons and vague text, it's
useless fluff that makes me click around and scroll a lot.

~~~
hamburglar
And in a couple years they're all going to look about as cool as the three
FrontPage themes that dominated every generic template website in the late
90's.

------
gotofritz
I saw this and really wanted to punch whoever put it together. What a tosser.

Thanks to bootstrap people with no skills are able to publish their content or
put their business on the web at low cost - HOW DARE THEY!! Instead they MUST
hire a hipster full stack designer / developer who will build them something
using the latest shiny tools and trends, and will then be totally
unmaintainable when said tools or trends fall out of fashion and they get
bored of it.

If all sites look the same good, it means there is going to be a market for
designers to make sites stand out. And if people stick to the templates good
too, at least these days they look slick and professional enough - do you
remember the web 10 years ago or earlier?

------
lucb1e
Yup, lots of sites. I don't really care, though, if every website looks just
fine, only alike. What about Blogger blogs? Or Facebook pages? They look even
more alike and people use them as free websites (instead of having an
expensive website, just create a Facebook page!).

The only thing that is getting old on those bootstrap sites is the appearing
icons as you scroll them into view and scrolling instead of having multiple
pages. Those fancy patterns will disappear soon enough I expect, perhaps with
the next bootstrap version. Then all sites will look alike again, just a bit
better.

------
rlv-dan
While I agree that's it's been over used, I have to wonder if it's better to
put your limited time on making a unique website rather than putting this time
into making a better product?.

------
amai
This is still my favorite bootstrap webpage generator:
[http://tiffzhang.com/startup/](http://tiffzhang.com/startup/)

------
k__
I can understand that opinion.

A designer sees this and thinks "How unoriginal, I could do this much better!"

But that is as if a front-end dev would see a WordPress page and say, that
they could do it better.

They probably could in many cases, but do you want to?

Do you want to design 50 landing pages per year?

I don't want to implement the basic functionality of WordPress again and
again, even IF I could do it better, because it's a solved problem and it's
solved "good enough" for me...

Go, design something new and great.

------
tn13
There is noting lazy or bad about using bootstrap. In fact it has made HTML
far more readable and maintainable. It has also made web in general more
beautiful than it use to be.

~~~
tangue
I can understand the part on the "more beautiful" but I for the html part I
suppose you don't have to deal everyday with things like :

    
    
      <div class="row">
            <div class="col-lg-3">
              <ul class="list-group">

~~~
foota
I fail to see the issue here?

~~~
tn13
Exactly! Those three lines of Bootstrap HTML tells me lot more than any other
three lines of a non bootstrap site.

------
cstrahan
What are some examples of sites that use this template? This is the first time
I've ever seen it.

Granted, I don't browse the web (just use email, GitHub, Hacker News and
Haskell subreddit and the random stuff those link to... and that's about
it)...

... but I'm really curious how one stumbles across this theme. What are people
looking for on the web? Am I missing out?

------
hexo
Looks like nowadays web hell. Its especially bad on phone - where I CANT ZOOM
OUT, just in (stop this nonsense!). Then there are animations into my face
everywhere (how do I turn this off?). And the button that scrolls... This is
not even funny anymore. Please make sites (more) accessible. This case is very
far from that.

------
upstandingdude
Welp, thats the point of bootstrap. To provide a nice default layout so you
can quickly slap together a page that is beautiful and works so you can focus
on other things.

------
tlrobinson
I'll take a boring old Bootstrap website any day over the ridiculous scroll-
hijacking parallax monstrosities that seem to be in vogue these days.

------
manu29d
Comedy is the best way to make a point.

Anyone else noticed he forgot to include the Google Analytics code from the
template? :D

------
fulldecent
If you can't design a website that looks better than bootstrap... Then use
bootstrap!

------
jameswatling
Is this template available for sale? I would like to purchase it!

------
oliwarner
Way to make me feel bad about using _this_ template :(

------
mrzool
Nice! Is this available as template?

------
partycoder
I think it looks fine.

------
automathematics
So glad I'm not the only one who hates this.

------
collegeman
Why be a jerk about anything? Life is too short.

------
mistertrotsky
I laughed.

------
gordian
Hmm, I guess trollstrap.com was taken?

------
guptagirishk
I can relate :)

------
plugnburn
ROFL but true.

Bootstrap has become a sign of a lazy developer.

~~~
manyxcxi
A great developer is an efficient developer. An efficient developer is lazy by
habit. It's a sign of a developer focusing on the core of their problem.

~~~
plugnburn
Ok, bootstrap (as well as jquery) has become a sign of lazy AND inefficient
developer.

~~~
cwilkes
Inefficient according to whom? Money or CPU cycles or being able to get
someone to enhance it later on?

~~~
plugnburn
You cannot enhance Bootstrap itself easily. Moreover, you cannot rewrite any
core functionality clearly done wrong. I don't need a widespread virus called
jQuery, I want to write pure JS, and I definitely have no need in that virus
to make my website truly responsive. Why use a plugin to make a hamburger menu
when you can do it using pure CSS3 and a hidden checkbox? Why all that
overhead?

[http://codeofrob.com/entries/you-have-ruined-
javascript.html](http://codeofrob.com/entries/you-have-ruined-javascript.html)

~~~
manyxcxi
If all you needed was a hamburger and a hidden checkbox, it would be a waste
to pull in jQuery. But even still, if you were familiar with the plugin and it
would take you 5 minutes to do it that way, why not? If page size or load
times are excessive at some point, trim the fat then. So many things already
require jQuery it's likely that the project a developer will be on already has
the framework, so they may not be impacting the page size at all.

But what if you want to use a form wizard plugin, validation, a calendar
picker, AJAX form posting with backward compatibility and can't use FormData
because you have to support those older browsers? Well, all of those cases are
covered and VERY well documented for jQuery and the different plugins you'd
need. So now you're being very efficient with your time and you're making the
smarter choice of giving yourself more time to focus on the problem you're
trying to solve, because I doubt rolling your own calendar picker is the goal
of the project.

Again, why would you build your own grid and responsive layout/break points
when you can just pull in Bootstrap? If the goal of your project is to build a
responsive grid, then obviously, go build it. But if your goal is to deliver a
web application for desktop and mobile that may already be facing some budget
or time constraints, the you're wasting your client's time and your employer's
money.

If you're picking Bootstrap or jQuery you're not trying to enhance them. Your
using them to jumpstart your project to build the parts that you need to
build.

jQuery is bloated and big, but it (and prototype/mootools/etc) lead the way
for cross browser compatibility from the time that making an AJAX request
required 20 lines of code and a bunch of cascading if/else blocks to make sure
which request object you were going to get. It's been around and grown to the
size and usage it has exactly because it was/is useful and brought some level
of efficiency.

I'm playing a bit of a devil's advocate here because I don't use jQuery for
much of anything these days. I'll use it if it's already in a project I've got
to touch. But I won't bring it in to a project I start unless there's a real
compelling reason.

I absolutely love someone who is interested in making better, specific
solutions for things, that is able to really understand the problems that come
with building a grid, or a calendar picker, etc.

Once that person has built up their own library of those things, then
absolutely they should use them over the jQuery and Bootstrap where it makes
sense. But that is also assuming that the developer actually did a better job
with what they built than what is offered in Bootstrap or jQuery. It's a bit
narcissistic to think you will always be better than what a team of people has
been working on for years, but it doesn't mean you're not wrong either.

Often though we are mid project when we realize we need a calendar picker or
some other widget for some three forms. I would have a very serious problem
with one of my developers careening off course and holding the project up for
6 days so they could build the widget from scratch when they could've gotten
one of many jQuery plugins and had all three forms done in two days.

At the end, you bring in the overhead of code maintained by somebody else
because you think it will let you finish faster, higher quality, or with
features you otherwise wouldn't be able to build.

~~~
plugnburn
> But even still, if you were familiar with the plugin and it would take you 5
> minutes to do it that way, why not?

Because I believe these kind of things must be solved with no JS at all, let
alone a bloatware lib.

> If page size or load times are excessive at some point, trim the fat then.

jQuery is THE fat.

> So many things already require jQuery

... that I try to avoid them as virus spreaders.

> a form wizard plugin

Wut?

> a calendar picker

<input type=date>

> AJAX form posting with backward compatibility

XMLHttpRequest (probably with some wrapper functions).

> and can't use FormData because you have to support those older browsers

If a thing happens we must enable front-side file uploads for unterbrowsers
without FormData, then we use our custom iframe-based solution and charge the
customer additionally. Unterbrowser users must suffer, as well as those who
want to support them.

> because I doubt rolling your own calendar picker is the goal of the project.

All the things we need were already rolled long before the project start.

> Again, why would you build your own grid and responsive layout/break points
> when you can just pull in Bootstrap?

Because my grid weighs 999 bytes. How many kilos does Bootstrap weigh?

> the you're wasting your client's time and your employer's money.

Nope, because the grid is already built.

> If you're picking Bootstrap or jQuery you're not trying to enhance them.
> Your using them to jumpstart your project to build the parts that you need
> to build.

Since they don't meet my needs 100% of the time, I would end up with some
modules that do the same as the ones written from scratch, but slower and with
buggy underlying code. Why would anyone prefer that?

> making an AJAX request required 20 lines of code and a bunch of cascading
> if/else blocks to make sure which request object you were going to get

How hard is it write it once, the way YOU see fit, and then use it all your
projects? Or you believe only jQuery authors are allowed to do that?

> It's a bit narcissistic to think you will always be better than what a team
> of people has been working on for years, but it doesn't mean you're not
> wrong either.

I'm not trying to be better than them. But yes, I'm trying to do _things I
need_ better than they can offer.

> At the end, you bring in the overhead of code maintained by somebody else
> because you think it will let you finish faster, higher quality, or with
> features you otherwise wouldn't be able to build.

In the real world though, "finish faster" and "higher quality" are almost
always mutually exclusive.

