Over the last few years, Bootstrap has become an increasingly popular front-end development framework. It enables developers & designers to quickly build fully responsive websites. The bootstrap framework has its global CSS with built-in components and extensible classes in the form of typography, navigation, buttons and much more. So why should you use Bootstrap? Here are some top reasons:
Fast Development
With Bootstrap, you can save your lot of precious time. The reason is that Bootstrap provides readymade pieces of code that you can easily convert into website. You don’t have to spend your lot of time and writing code. Just find the suitable code and in use it accordingly into your website. In addition to this, Bootstrap handles your style and design as the CSS is built with LESS.
Extensive list of components
Bootstrap is rich with its long list of built in components. You can get most of elements easily like drop down menus, pagination or alert boxes and much more. The styling of every single element follows a consistent theme and if you know LESS, then customizing will takes just few minutes.
Some components are:
- Glyphicons
- Dropdowns
- Responsive embed
- Button Groups
- Navigation Bar
- Breadcrumbs
- Labels & Badges
- Alerts
- Progress Bar
- Popovers
- And many others.
Fully Customizable
This is main feature of Bootstrap as it makes you to handle everything at your end. You have a complete control over what you wish to use, so that you can streamline the framework to suit your needs. You can also grab the source code and optimize it even further. Actually you can go through the whole framework and keep what you need and ditch what you don’t.
Responsiveness
Bootstrap is a fully responsive. By using the fluid grid layout, you can design responsive websites. The fluid grid system uses percents instead of pixels for column widths. It has the same responsive capabilities as our fixed grid system, ensuring proper proportions for key screen resolutions and devices.
Custom jQuery plugins
With Bootstrap, you get custom-built jQuery plugins to bring your projects to life.
Cross-Browser
Originally built with only modern browsers in mind, Bootstrap has evolved to include support for all major browsers (even IE7!) and, with Bootstrap 2, tablets and smartphones, too.
Built on LESS
Bootstrap is built on LESS. You take benefit of LESS variables, nesting, operations, and mixins which makes coding CSS faster and more efficient with minimal overhead.
Good documentation
Bootstrap has great documentation. Actually most of newer platforms have not proper documentation, but Bootstrap gives you a head start because you don’t have to play with everything to learn and instead can find information on just about anything through the documentation.
Conclusion
After going through all this, if you think Bootstrap can help you to your next website then you can check out the platform here: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap. You can either download a compiled version or get the Bootstrap source which has original CSS and JavaScript docs.
