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Ask HN: How bad does Bootstrap look on a production site?

8 points by RaphiePS ↗ HN
I'm a backend guy starting his first foray into building the frontend for a consumer webapp.

However, I have next to no design skills and Bootstrap makes a lot of sense to me (ease of use, relatively nice-looking).

Does a Bootstrapped site look sketchy to you? If so, any recommendations for a more legit-looking framework? Thanks!

12 comments

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orangethirty
Bootstrap is a framework and not a look. I suggest you hire a designed who may help you build a good looking front end while using bootstrap to deal with cross-browser issues and grids.
palidanx
We are using bootstrap, and skin it using

http://bootswatch.com/

As orangethirty wrote, you can get a css developer to skin the entire thing.

Goopplesoft
Consider it a solid base to build on thats fairly easy to skin later on. As a developer who hates design, I gotta say bootstrap was my kick into liking design. One major tip: put patience in design, dont expect things to happen in 5 minutes do lots of experimentation and tinkering. Also try to get into less css.

Some resources:

http://ajkochanowicz.github.com/Kickstrap/

https://wrapbootstrap.com/

http://bootswatch.com/

http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

http://jetstrap.com/

http://www.boottheme.com/

http://designshack.net/articles/css/20-awesome-resources-for...

midibite
Can this be deployed with Wordpress?
rtcoms
You can get bootstrap themes from https://wrapbootstrap.com/ as per your requirements
grumps
Not sure about them. I bought a "bootstrap" css from them, completely worthless. I would have to re-work all the html because they extended most of the base into their own abstraction. tl;dr - the implementation I bought didn't use bootstrap.
minimaxir
Don't use the default CSS styles. Make it your own brand.
joshuacc
A raw bootstrap site doesn't look sketchy, just a little undesigned. Depending on your audience, this may be perfectly fine.
santa_boy
I am not a designer so perhaps can relate to you question. I think Bootstrap is a great choice for non-designers who basically want to hack a usable and reliable design. Bootstrap has great advantages to designing a site / webapp that is usable and functional. Much of the design has been well vetted for cross browsers and bugs have been fixed to a great degree.

There are lots of resources available as in the comments to customize bootstrap so that it can achieve a reasonable degree of distinction (vs. the default template).

You will find some great themes that you could mimic to almost have no "traditional" bootstrap trace left in the initial UI experience.

Also, once you get used to Bootstrap you are not going to have to relearn the semantics to get your design out. You can focus more on customizations and the core of your webapp.

I've compiled a huge list of Bootstrap resources over the past year (as mentioned in the other comments). I hope to put another "directory" out shortly.

trapexit
Don't waste any time or money whatsoever on a custom design until you have validated your app idea by getting people to pay you money for it.

Even if you are building an app for hackers / designers who are familiar with Bootstrap and might balk at something being "Bootstrappy", your first customers are going to realize that it's just a beta site.

If you are building for any other market, you may never need to bother customizing your design. Out-of-the-box Bootstrap looks better than 99% of the niche software out there.

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