Remember the time in the early days of the web where every anchor tag was this brilliant color blue and every form an element had the same grey beveled look? This was the original style guide for the web. But sadly we haven’t had a globally accepted update to that style.

We’ve had designers creating adhoc design concepts like Soft Bevels, Metro, and Minimalist. But each was always built on their own system of elements and CSS classes. And if you were lucky, were at least standard within a content management system (CMS).

The release of Twitter’s bootstrap is brilliant because we finally have a style guide that includes all the modern elements of web design.

• Typography
• Layout
• Forms
• Buttons
• Icons & Images
• Tables
• And more…

Why Bootstrap is Important for Developers

Responsive Design for Mobile

Out of the box the Bootstrap framework supports responsive design for a mobile website. So with a minor amount of effort you can turn a desktop design into a user friendly mobile website without duplicating content.

Themes

Bootstrap is theme-able and extensible framework. It dedicates a number of sites to providing high-quality designs. So now we have the building blocks to make our site look the way we want but with a foundation that every designer,  programmer, and content administrator is familiar with and can re-use in every project and page.

Why Boostrap is Important for End Users

Documentation

Bootstrap also has documentation going for it. It displays nearly every element and use case with an example and source code to reproduce that result. So whether you know what you want or just want to browse the site for inspiration on how to layout some content all the options are laid out for you.

Consistency

Now the barrier to entry for content administrators is simply some basic HTML and a few CSS classes that create consistent high quality and cleanly laid out content. No matter if  you want tabs, accordions, buttons, or simply want to position an image around some text. You get it all.

The Future

In an ideal world every wysiwyg editor like: RadEditor, TinyMCE, CKEditor etc. would update their tooling so that Boostrap’s classes and features were only a button click away as the bold, unordered list and text justifications buttons are.