Comment by randomdrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomdrake | Hacker News Reader

>Don’t be “just another Twitter Bootstrap site”

I find these criticisms regarding the ability to recognize a "Twitter Bootstrap site" to be inconsiderate of the audience for which the sites were really created.

Generally speaking, the startup development community exposes themselves to new websites on a pretty frequent basis. Just because we can recognize a particular CSS framework, doesn't mean the intended audience of the website can.

I would be surprised if it wasn't an extremely small percentage of website users that would be able to recognize "just another Twitter Bootstrap site."

Don't let yourself get caught up in the bubble of the ever-critical development community. If you're building a site just to please folks within that community, you should probably do a bit more research on who you really want your target demographic to be.

This happened to me last week. I have near-zero design skills, so I just used a standard Twitter Bootstrap design for my site. Though I'm still embarrassed a bit by it, it works for now while I'm working on other more critical elements.

But I had a friend check out the site recently who went out of her way to praise the UI; she had expected something much more utilitarian. And I think this is more common; there are still so, so many BAD sites on the net that even a standard Bootstrap site is of pretty good quality/usability.

So while I still do plan on upgrading from a fairly default Bootstrap experience in the future, I'm no longer quite so embarrassed about using it now.

I was going to say exactly the same thing. If your website is selling twitter bootstrap themes, chances are you need to put some effort into your theme.

If it's an intro page, a FAQ, a contact page and it's aimed at people who don't give a shit about if it looks like 1000 other websites then there's nothing wrong with that.

1) Do something 2) Tell people 3) Iterate

Sometimes you can swap over 1+2. Do not get hung up about not using the standard theme just because 0.1% of your visitors might recognise where it's from. Are they your target customers ?

Bootstrap is a good way to slap together a website for internal use. It does the job and looks ok - I like that very much. It's a godsend for programmers with less than stellar CSS skill.

As a web person, can you honestly say that you always put yourself 100% in the shoes of a user?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com