Comment by KZeillmann
10 years ago
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.