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.
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.
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.
That particular bootstrap theme has enough flair that it gets annoying to see it repeatedly. There is more to bootstrap than just that single theme, but it has become too popular.
Imagine if there was a video editing template that cut any movie to 60 seconds, with transitions every 10 seconds, set to the music from Inception: it might look cool the first time, but you'll get sick of the template quickly because it has very specific features that stand out.
The hate is certainly unwarranted. I think we should be promoting the benefits of design rather than cutting down those that don't necessarily see the benefits in having a custom UI.
Bootstrap is certainly boring and provides a very homogenous visual aesthetic, but it's all in how you use the framework. If you simply pull everything out of the box and slap it onto your app I think you're doing your product a disservice.
> In fact, the uniformity makes it easier for me to process the content.
Indeed, I think people underappreciate the advantage of this.
In the past I've designed some pages that were objectively better than the existing patterns, but people wouldn't get it (only hackers, in the hacker news sense of the word, would get it and like it). Now, years of gradual change later, lots of sites work this way and people get it.
These days I notice when sites don't work like most; it makes it really hard to find anything, even though the design might be pretty great on its own.
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.
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.
Uniformity of sites using bootstrap is not equivalent to uniformity of all websites, unless you believe all websites use bootstrap. Having a core of websites that use bootstrap and are fairly similar and easy to navigate because of that isn't a bad thing, and it may make the few sites that are novel and really do something new and better easier to spot and appreciate.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, this is clearly a joke and he even says the template is nice at the bottom. There's nothing wrong with using this template, and I don't think the creator of this site would disagree. People seem to be taking the blunt tone as them telling us not to use this template, but it seems more like good-natured ribbing to me.
I use a bootstrap theme I worked on which basically removes all the graphical stuff and leaves just the grid system. It makes dead easy to compose a layout and it can still be tuned to suit any design.
The only thing that I find hard to tune is the navbar, as you can see here it's the only thing giving that bootstrap vibe https://vimeo.com/147455840
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?
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?
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.
I agree. For a lot of small companies/side projects I'm not at all annoyed by overuse of bootstrap. I think that it's better to put your energy into making a great and unique product than making a great and unique page to sell your product.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Most designers could never create something that's better than the basic bootstrap framework, which makes this site incredibly ironic. There's nothing wrong with a common design language or layout system for the web. I shouldn't have to sit there for 5 minutes to guess how to navigate a website.
Mainly that it's overused, as the article subtly implies.
Also, I think, that it embodies style-over-substance in web design: lots of empty space, lots of unnecessary scrolling, lots of cute but pointless gimcrackery.
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.
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.
Bootstrap is simply the new look of that old table-based 90's web design ( http://www.foopee.com/punk/the-list/ , 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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?.
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...
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.
You can always replace the divs with more semantic markup, just with the Bootstrap classes attached. I mean, using a main element for the container, a div for the row, then an article and various aside elements for the columns (depending on the layout and structure) will at least make the source code somewhat easier to parse.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It is insane that this thread got downvotes. WTF guys, it's just a Joke-website. That comment seems like a joke about it.
I don't understand why it got downvotes.
Edit: typo
Hey, I see you are new here. Don't take the downvotes personally, it's just that Hacker News users prefer to keep conversations focused. Thus, the following types of comment tend to get downvoted somewhat quickly:
* simply (dis)agreeing (there are up/downvote buttons for that)
* condescendence, insults, etc.
This is very different from Reddit where numerous threads end up littered with jokes and puns. On the other hand the following types of comments tend to get upvoted:
* insightful and well structured (as in: cut in several paragraphes)
* food for thought
* counter-point (politely worded, obviously)
* sourced
----------------------------------------
Your first comment was probably mostly perceived as a joke:
* “ROFL” just expresses your personal reaction to previous information, and the common use of this acronym usually signals a low quality comment
* “Bootstrap has become a sign of a lazy developer”: this reads as both condescending (“lazy developer”) and unsupported; a more constructed argument with the same idea would have been fine
Your second comment contains the word "downvote", which is often enough to get downvotes.
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.
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.
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.
That particular bootstrap theme has enough flair that it gets annoying to see it repeatedly. There is more to bootstrap than just that single theme, but it has become too popular.
Imagine if there was a video editing template that cut any movie to 60 seconds, with transitions every 10 seconds, set to the music from Inception: it might look cool the first time, but you'll get sick of the template quickly because it has very specific features that stand out.
The hate is certainly unwarranted. I think we should be promoting the benefits of design rather than cutting down those that don't necessarily see the benefits in having a custom UI.
Bootstrap is certainly boring and provides a very homogenous visual aesthetic, but it's all in how you use the framework. If you simply pull everything out of the box and slap it onto your app I think you're doing your product a disservice.
> In fact, the uniformity makes it easier for me to process the content.
Indeed, I think people underappreciate the advantage of this.
In the past I've designed some pages that were objectively better than the existing patterns, but people wouldn't get it (only hackers, in the hacker news sense of the word, would get it and like it). Now, years of gradual change later, lots of sites work this way and people get it.
These days I notice when sites don't work like most; it makes it really hard to find anything, even though the design might be pretty great on its own.
I don't think the creator is saying there is a problem, honestly. The language is blunt, but it really seems like a joke more than a statement.
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.
You talking communism and evangelising standardisation in the field of art and craft. Imagine all books paperback, is that ok?
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.
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Uniformity of sites using bootstrap is not equivalent to uniformity of all websites, unless you believe all websites use bootstrap. Having a core of websites that use bootstrap and are fairly similar and easy to navigate because of that isn't a bad thing, and it may make the few sites that are novel and really do something new and better easier to spot and appreciate.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, this is clearly a joke and he even says the template is nice at the bottom. There's nothing wrong with using this template, and I don't think the creator of this site would disagree. People seem to be taking the blunt tone as them telling us not to use this template, but it seems more like good-natured ribbing to me.
I use a bootstrap theme I worked on which basically removes all the graphical stuff and leaves just the grid system. It makes dead easy to compose a layout and it can still be tuned to suit any design.
The only thing that I find hard to tune is the navbar, as you can see here it's the only thing giving that bootstrap vibe https://vimeo.com/147455840
All in all it's a good tool to tame browsers.
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?
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?
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.
The last line is:
"Honestly this template does look really nice, though."
I agree. For a lot of small companies/side projects I'm not at all annoyed by overuse of bootstrap. I think that it's better to put your energy into making a great and unique product than making a great and unique page to sell your product.
I think the gripe is how much little thought goes into HCI and how copy-paste programming leads to better portfolio and job offers.
I can't find any fault with that. Recruitment is as much broken as interviewing is...
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Most clients won't need real design or anything more sophisticated than Wordpress.
He forgot to break the Back button.
How come this didn't highjack my scrollbar?
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.
Listen to the youth. There is wisdom in what she says.
Do you remember what the Internet looked like before bootstrap?
I do.
I'll take it.
I think it looked just fine.
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Also http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
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That doesn't contain any buttons or grids or any of the interactive stuff that Bootstrap provides, so its not a great comparison.
If you think that looks just fine, what do you actually think looks bad?
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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.
Where is the parallax effect?
Looks quite nice, at a glance. What am I missing?
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.
> "making fun"
Like this? "Ha ha, you chose the most cost effective web-design option. What a dummy you are."
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Most designers could never create something that's better than the basic bootstrap framework, which makes this site incredibly ironic. There's nothing wrong with a common design language or layout system for the web. I shouldn't have to sit there for 5 minutes to guess how to navigate a website.
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Mainly that it's overused, as the article subtly implies.
Also, I think, that it embodies style-over-substance in web design: lots of empty space, lots of unnecessary scrolling, lots of cute but pointless gimcrackery.
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.
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.
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.
Bootstrap is simply the new look of that old table-based 90's web design ( http://www.foopee.com/punk/the-list/ , 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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of the picture in this article:
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?.
This is still my favorite bootstrap webpage generator: http://tiffzhang.com/startup/
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.
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.
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 :
I do. And I still prefer it over the alternative.
I fail to see the issue here?
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You can always replace the divs with more semantic markup, just with the Bootstrap classes attached. I mean, using a main element for the container, a div for the row, then an article and various aside elements for the columns (depending on the layout and structure) will at least make the source code somewhat easier to parse.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Comedy is the best way to make a point.
Anyone else noticed he forgot to include the Google Analytics code from the template? :D
If you can't design a website that looks better than bootstrap... Then use bootstrap!
Is this template available for sale? I would like to purchase it!
Way to make me feel bad about using this template :(
Nice! Is this available as template?
I think it looks fine.
So glad I'm not the only one who hates this.
Why be a jerk about anything? Life is too short.
I laughed.
Hmm, I guess trollstrap.com was taken?
I can relate :)
ROFL but true.
Bootstrap has become a sign of a lazy developer.
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.
Ok, bootstrap (as well as jquery) has become a sign of lazy AND inefficient developer.
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It is insane that this thread got downvotes. WTF guys, it's just a Joke-website. That comment seems like a joke about it. I don't understand why it got downvotes. Edit: typo
Hey, I see you are new here. Don't take the downvotes personally, it's just that Hacker News users prefer to keep conversations focused. Thus, the following types of comment tend to get downvoted somewhat quickly:
* jokes
* complaints about downvotes
* downvote predictions (thus self-fulfilling prophecies)
* single word / single expression
* simply (dis)agreeing (there are up/downvote buttons for that)
* condescendence, insults, etc.
This is very different from Reddit where numerous threads end up littered with jokes and puns. On the other hand the following types of comments tend to get upvoted:
* insightful and well structured (as in: cut in several paragraphes)
* food for thought
* counter-point (politely worded, obviously)
* sourced
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Your first comment was probably mostly perceived as a joke:
* “ROFL” just expresses your personal reaction to previous information, and the common use of this acronym usually signals a low quality comment
* “Bootstrap has become a sign of a lazy developer”: this reads as both condescending (“lazy developer”) and unsupported; a more constructed argument with the same idea would have been fine
Your second comment contains the word "downvote", which is often enough to get downvotes.
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You might want to have a look at:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
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