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Comment by shostack | Hacker News Reader

And the reality is that despite this, the vast majority of people have no idea what Bootstrap is, won't notice, and frankly wouldn't care. Increasingly site design is differentiated by the imagery used as images get elevated in prominence, and that is all you need to differentiate your design many times.

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I disagree that people "won't notice". They totally do. The other day my gf (medical field professional, not a "techie") was looking for a good restaurant to go to and, completely unprompted by me, blurted out "OMG why does every freaking restaurant website look the same!?!" (she couldn't keep track of which restaurant was which among her open tabs.)

I think more people notice than we'd like to admit. There just isn't any direct way for them to tell us about it.

Maybe it was the same (overused) restaurant wordpress theme that has nothing to do with Bootstrap? Sites looking similar was an 'issue' well before Bootstrap.

Many wordpress themes are based in bootstrap too.

I wish restaurants used a clear and consistent format. They can differentiate with their branding, colours, and obviously food photographs. I'd prefer they had a consistent layout!

Too many have shoddy intros, tiny text, difficult to find details and then their beloved PDF menus.

> I wish restaurants used a clear and consistent format. They can differentiate with their branding, colours, and obviously food photographs. I'd prefer they had a consistent layout!

I'm skeptical. If you're trying to choose a steak restaurant to visit, for example, you're saying that you'd easily be able to differentiate grill_1 with "this" picture of a big bloody steak, and grill_2 with "that" picture of a big bloody steak, both in roughly the same position. Doesn't sound plausible to me.

I agree with the principle though, restaurant sites are often terrible, and PDF menus are super annoying.

They'd still have a logo, photos of the interior, different copy and colour schemes. How is it that much more useful to differentiate based on their web design? That only demonstrates a willingness to either spend more on their web site or not interfere with the process.

Colours help, sure, but more differentiation makes them more memorable, and being memorable makes for more repeat business. Marketing wouldn't exist and be so successful if our brains didn't work like that.

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