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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, default Bootstrap skin looks boring and unprofessional,

Sigh... bootstrap didn't get where it is by looking unprofessional.

I also don't understand wanting every admin interface one comes across to be a special snowflake, the opposite of what should be the case. We've known for at least 30 years (Apple HIG) that a standardized look and feel is a benefit to users, not a detriment. Not to mention dev maintainability.

I suppose billable hours decrease when reinventing the wheel is no longer necessary.

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Uh, that's typical rhetoric about default Bootstrap interface. Like if someone used default bootstrap skin then he's just lazy and didn't really care. Thus unprofessional.

Personally, I think that Bootstrap interface is good enough, but its widespread adoption lead to the perception I mentioned above.

I understand, and that's why I'm a bit annoyed, it's a very developer-centric attitude propagated by the sentence above.

Personally, an end-user has never asked me to make their software/web-admin look unique. A portfolio site? Sure, but an admin page? Not other than their official color/logo in the header.

Uniqueness is just not a concern with "normal" people, and with good reason as I mentioned above. Still, congrats on the nice work on the site/post.

The fact that Bootstrap is widespread, and therefore perceived by some unprofessional, does not make a user using it unprofessional, nor does it make the framework unprofessional.

Are Django or Flask unprofessional since they are widespread?

Unfortunately, you can't compare development frameworks to UI frameworks. No one knows that you're a dog on the Internet. But anyone without technical knowledge can see a site that's built with the default Bootstrap skin and say - hey, I saw it before.

Bootstrap is good and clean framework, it is _great_ for developers. But just because it is so widespread and highly visible, there's some of prejudice around it.

Nonetheless, I'm using Bootstrap in my projects and happy with it.

While that is true I think that most users will be oblivious to the commonalities - as developers we are not only familiar with bootstrap but also with the myriad developer-built sites that are more likely to use it

I think this prejudice only exists within this community where if you aren't that special snowflake you're not cool. I'd guess 99% of web traffic has no clue what Bootstrap is, what it looks like by default, how it is different when it is skinned. I would guess more than anything that they just think, this is what a website looks like now-a-days.

I'm happy to use it too with very minimal tweaking because it looks good out of the box, way more pleasant than browser defaults, it works well, fairly well maintained.

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