Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamt | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think the Bootstrap templates at wrapboostrap (http://wrapboostrap.com/) look far better and give you a much better starting point. Sure these are not free, but for a one-off website typically cost about $20 which is peanuts.

View on HN

Hi. I made Start Bootstrap. I agree that Wrap Bootstrap offers much better finished products than my tool. The purpose of my tool is to start with a somewhat blank slate.

Buying a template is like buying a finished painting and sticking it in a custom frame. Building a site from scratch is like painting your own painting.

Start Bootstrap is kind of like getting a paint-by-number. Some of the work is done, and the elements are there for you. If you want, you can just use the default styles and make it look okay, but if you're a bit more experienced as a painter you can make it look even better by adding some of your own style.

I definitely think that if you're looking for a nice, clean, completed template then head over to http://wrapbootstrap.com and check out their selection! If you're looking for something a bit more barebones, then http://startbootstrap.com is built for you! :)

I agree that they fill different needs and there's definitely room for both. I think a good addition to http://startbootstrap.com would be a few preconfigured palettes that will work with the templates.

http://bootswatch.com already has some of these. I might start integrating some of my own sometime though. Might not be a bad idea.

Hi, I logged in to thank you for start bootstrap. I'm not from US and 20 $ isn't peanuts its about 1500 bucks with which i can host an entire website for 1 year( in my country). I really love your bare templates, and will start using them from my next project.

Thanks again for all the good work and keeping them free.

That's awesome. Thanks for using my templates. I'm adding more every week, so be sure to keep checking back!

For the most part, I'd agree. I've bought a number of templates there. However, many of them tend to be very opinionated, adding a lot of JavaScript and non-Bootstrap markup. You see a lot of the same features that feel "me too!" (for example, parallax sliders) Once you buy and start converting to your needs, you'll find that the files and directory structure may be a little jacked up (recently did a lot of the work with the Ace Admin theme, and found image directories inside of the css directory, even though it had a separate root images directory, and there was both "images" and "img" directories.. fun.

That has been my assessment as well. I once bought a theme there and ended up spending more time changing the code so the classes are similar to what Bootstrap uses.

That's why I am starting http://bootmystrap.com/ All changes in just one LESS file, using same classes as Bootstrap so if you do buy a theme it actually saves you time.

I agree. If you're building a site you're going to end up maintaining for a long time, you should be building it from the ground up yourself. These sites are great at inspiration though! Your site showcasing extremely barebones demos is great.

I've had that same experience. I bought a theme very niavely thinking that it would follow bootstrap conventions and would be easily modifiable. Instead, I've got a huge mess and I think I'm just going to throw it out. I've been looking for a site like yours, that actually respects LESS. I hope it takes off and will definitely be keeping an eye on it.

Wrong link.

Right link: https://wrapbootstrap.com/

Is it easy-ish to integrate wrapbootstrap themes into a Rails app?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com