What is Bootstrap?

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing mobile-first projects.

Bootstrap is the most used framework in various projects around the world. Its closest competitor has a community several times smaller. In Bootstrap ready-made CSS styles and JS scripts are provided, to apply which you just need to specify the necessary style classes and attributes for HTML elements.

Bootstrap is primarily known for its excellent responsive properties for working on mobile projects. All thanks to the famous Bootstrap grid, which allows you to easily adapt any website and display it well on any device.

What is Bootstrap used for?

In general, to better understand why you need Bootstrap, we can go back a bit and answer the question: “What is a CSS framework in general?”

Essentially, in simple terms, it is a file or several files with ready-made code that are connected to the website in the head section, after which you gain the ability to use the features of this framework.

Frameworks are created to make it easier for other web developers to build websites. I already mentioned at the beginning that today almost any developer, having built a couple of websites from scratch, thinks about how to speed up the development process.

The fact is that if we are going to develop a website from scratch, we will have to take care of many things. All CSS styles and web scripts will have to be written from scratch, which can amount to hundreds or thousands of lines of code. Moreover, you can make a lot of mistakes in the layout. For example, your template will simply look different in major browsers or will not respond to queries.

In general, just for the sake of a responsive layout, you should use Bootstrap, because if we are talking about fixed layouts, they are easy to create even from scratch. We just create blocks, give them a fixed width, and work with the layout.

But in the case of responsive layout, everything is much more complicated. You will need to ensure that your website displays correctly at any screen resolution. For this, you will need to use media queries. For larger projects, you may need many such queries, plus you will still have to learn how to write them.

In general, when you develop a responsive layout from scratch, you will have to work hard, and your layout skills must be quite high.

But what about Bootstrap? If you learn this framework, it will significantly simplify the layout for you. First of all, the framework takes care of cross-browser compatibility and performance, which are the main things a developer should care about. But with Bootstrap, they are very easy to implement. This allows creating an HTML template even for a person who has previously done very little layout work and is not particularly familiar with CSS.

Secondly, the structure is ideal for teamwork. With the right skills and understanding, coding in Bootstrap is 3-5 times faster, and code consistency will allow any of your colleagues to make changes. If we are talking about a layout without a framework, each developer may have their own style, and someone else will have to spend some time studying their code.

As an advantage of the structure, I would also like to highlight the large Russian-speaking community and the availability of good documentation in our language. Thanks to such prevalence, many templates have appeared for Bootstrap, where the design of all main elements has already been reworked. You can connect these templates and build your websites based on them, just changing something slightly.