Sabrina Davidson
Bootstrap is a popular tool used by front end developers for web development. But what is it exactly you ask. We know it’s useful and it’s very helpful for front end developers and their coding.
Bootstrap is a web development toolkit created by two former employees of the popular site Twitter, Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton. According to the Bootstrap website. These two founded the one of the “most popular HTML, CSS ,and JS frameworks for developing responsive mobile first projects.”
So basically bootstrap is a giant collection of reusable bits of code written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It can help front-end developers quickly, create and build fully responsive websites. It saves designers and developers tons of time meaning they have more time to spend designing pages and the best part its FREE. You can easily download from getbootstrap.com
Let’s look at some advantages that bootstrap provides.
Bootstrap comes with a predefined grid system. This way you can get straight to filling it in with your content rather than taking hours to code a grid system.
Bootstrap has default breakpoints or you can customize each column to fit your needs.
Bootstrap comes with it own .img code and predefined CSS rules for automatically resizing images for current screen size. Which makes coding for mobile and smaller screen size so much faster. It can also change the shape of images with the addition of classes. These can include img-circle and img-rounded without going back and forth between the code and your design.
Let’s talk about this library its huge. There are a ton of elements that you can easily place in to your web pages. Like:
And more
These are super easy to place in your code and they can add great design elements to your pages. These will also be mobile responsive so they’ll look great no matter the screen size.
Still not each? No problem Bootstrap also allows for you to add javascript through JQuery.
JQuery has dozens of customizable plugins. These offer more room of interactivity, like easy solutions for modal popups, transitions, image carousels and more.
A big problem with frameworks such as Bootstraps is their size which can slow down you applications first load time. But with bootstraps they have found a way to combat this problem but allowing you to select which functionality you want to include in your download. This cuts down size and load time.
Documentation for bootstrap is great. They have every piece of code described and explained in detail on their website. Explanations include code samples for basic implements and how to simplify the process for beginners. All you have to do is choose a component, copy and paste into your page, and customize for there.
Like with many open-source projects there is a large support community. Since bootstrap is also on GitHub it makes it super easy for developers to modify and contribute to the codebase.
There is also an active twitter page, blog and Slack room for Bootstrap. Plus there is a Stack-Overflow tag “bootstrap-4” where even more questions and answers can be found.
As bootstraps popularity grew people started creating templates based off of bootstrap. There are many websites dedicated to sharing and buying custom templates. Here are just a few:
Wrapping it all up
As you can see bootstrap is pretty awesome in that you can get a site up and running pretty quickly. It’s easy to integrate a lot of great features without having to code them from scratch. Bootstrap is so popular it has been used to build some great websites like NASA, FIFA and more.
Lastly, If you need help getting started digitally, are looking to get started with web design or just want to reach out check out my services and contact page.
Thanks for reading Tech Byte with Brina
Ouellette, A. (2017, September 20). What is Bootstrap: A Beginner’s Guide. Retrieved from Career Foundry: https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/web-development/what-is-bootstrap-a-beginners-guide/
