If you haven’t already done so, you’ll want to check out Twitter Bootstrap. Bootstrap is the latest improvement on website development and design. It’s an open source framework developed by the guys who brought us Twitter with a handful of instruments in its toolbox for fast and easy web creation.
Bootstrap is great for programmers or non-programmers, novices or experts who want to put a website together quickly and easily. It’s as simple as selecting the chunk of code you want and plugging it into the website you’re building. It’s great for those who aren’t code-savvy and experts don’t have to do as much grunt work or mundane tasks like user management, caching, templating, logging and error handling, and security. Plus, it doesn’t require a lot of learning or guess-and-check work. Bootstrap comes with exceptional documentation so you can get done what you need to get done faster.
Once you’ve added the code you want to your website, you can customize it as little or as much as you’d like. But beware: Bootstrap has a very simple look if left as-is and many people get tired of seeing what looks like the same website over and over again. Fortunately, this doesn’t create a big problem because customizing Bootstrap is easy. You can use some of these tools to alter your website’s appearance:
- Kickstrap – an extension of Bootstrap that provides apps, themes, and other extras.
- Bootswatch – gives you more themes (color themes) to choose from.
- Boottheme – allows you to drag-and-drop elements onto your web page and click on them to edit.
- PaintStrap – generates themes using color schemes from Adobe Kuler or COLOURlovers.
- {wrap}Bootstrap – a store for already-made themes
More Conveniences with Bootstrap
Bootstrap is always improving. The web developers behind Bootstrap release updates very frequently – about every few weeks or every few months as opposed to other programs that are only updated once, maybe twice a year.
Secondly, Bootstrap is highly compatible across many browsers since it uses a main set of development code, which consists of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. What you see on Firefox, you’ll see on Chrome and Internet Explorer.It also uses responsive and non-responsive grid layouts. The responsive grid layouts allow you to develop for desktops, tablets, and mobiles without having to do any extra work. Bootstrap even incorporates features like support for CSS3 and HTML5, which are expected to be the future of web design.
Bootstrap already ranks number one on GitHub for popularity – it’s actually twice as popular is the runner up! You can watch our video where we learned more out Bootstrap, or experience what all the fuss is about by downloading it from GitHub.