My Favorite Things About Bootstrap

February 6, 2018

I am a front-end web developer who recently began using a framework called Bootstrap. I’ve enjoyed learning this framework and it has made life a lot easier when it comes to responsive design and browser compatibility. Bootstrap is great because it does most of the heavy lifting for you. Below, I will discuss what Bootstrap is, what I really enjoy about Bootstrap, and why I think Bootstrap is worth learning about.

What is Bootstrap?

Bootstrap is a powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development. It includes HTML and CSS based design templates for common user interface components like Typography, Forms, Buttons, Tables, Navigations, Dropdowns, Alerts, Modals, Tabs, Accordion, Carousel and many other as well as optional JavaScript extensions. Bootstrap also gives you ability to create responsive layout with much less effort.

Bootstrap is able to reduce much of the coding you would usually have to do by hand. It can even be used if you only have a small amount of knowledge about CSS since most of the work is done by utilizing it’s customized classes. However, you do need to add your own CSS if you want to make your site look more customized. In addition, the most recent versions of Bootstrap are responsive right out-of-the-box, making sites for desktop, tablets and mobile devices much easier to develop.

Here four things that I really, really like about Bootstrap.

1. Bootstrap is very easy to use.

Bootstrap is extremely easy to learn and use. As long as you have a basic knowledge of HTML, you can use Bootstrap. It is also helpful to have some knowledge of CSS but CSS isn’t required. It allows you to customize your site and understand some of what Bootstrap is doing, but Bootstrap utilizes classes in HTML. As long as you know HTML and the classes that Bootstrap utilizes, you should have no problem getting it up and running.

2. Bootstrap is responsive.

In today’s world, people access the internet with so many various devices – desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and phones. It became quite a daunting task to develop separate sites for every screen type. The answer to this problem was responsive design. Responsive design means a website’s page can change and adapt to display the most optimal setting for whatever device the user is using. In order to do this, the developer needs to write specific styles using media queries to display certain styles for specific screen sizes. With Bootstrap, you no longer need to do this. Starting with Bootstrap 3, Bootstrap is responsive by default. This makes building a website optimized for all screen sizes extremely simple without having to worry too much about writing media queries in CSS. Bootstrap uses a grid system to keep everything in line and is responsive to five different screen sizes – extra large, large, medium, small and extra small.

3. Bootstrap is cross browser compatible.

Bootstrap is compatible with all modern browsers like Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. There is no need to write special code or extensive JavaScript to make your sites as widely compatible as possible. Bootstrap does all of this for you.

4. Bootstrap is open source.

One of the best parts of Bootstrap is that it is open source and 100% free for you to download and use. This means that when you have a problem, you can dig into the code of bootstrap itself in order to better understand what everything does and diagnose it from there. Additionally, since it’s open-source that means if you find something that is a bug, you could report it as an issue yourself on the Bootstrap github page. The Bootstrap library is maintained by the community, so this means ever developer using it could also be contributing to it. That’s cool stuff.

There are numerous benefits to using Bootstrap for your website. With Bootstrap you can quickly make responsive sites for a wide variety of devices with minimal time and effort. I hope this article convinced you to give Bootstrap a try and see how easy building a completely responsive website can truly be.

If you’d like to learn more about Bootstrap, take a look at GetBootstrap – it is a great resource. They provide examples and documentation that can get a savvy web developer up-and-running with the library in no time flat.

Here at Philly Marketing Labs we use Bootstrap as often as possible for new WordPress websites, as well as other platforms, so if you think you could use a website designed from the ground up to be responsive, cross browser compatible, and have easy access to advanced UI features – then we should chat! We have an in-house team that can both design and develop your next website, and we’d love to discuss your needs and business goals. Check out our Development page to learn more about the website development we do here at PML or check out our Design Portfolio to see some of our recent work.