What is Bootstrap and why should I care?
Early in the HTMl/CSS journey to enlightenment, you might have heard a thing or two about something called Bootstrap. What the heck is it? How do you use a bootstrap to build a webpage? Why should I care? Perhaps you already know a thing or two about HTML and you have a solid understanding of how CSS works, but there is this hazy point in everyone’s progression where certain concepts are just a little too murky. I’ll attempt to shed some light on the subject and perhaps make that transition into the light of knowledge a little easier.
CSS to the rescue
When one starts out creating a website, there are certain things that designers and developers do to make things easier on themselves as they go. Creating a common set of classes that can be used over and over on the page’s HTML is one of those time savers. For instance, suppose I create a class called “bold” for assigning bold to a font and another class called “cent-align” for centering text. I can apply those classes at the same time or independently of each other on the text that I want in the document. Those two classes are now part of the building blocks used as the styling foundation for the website that I’m creating. If I keep creating more and more classes like that, pretty soon I have a nice set of tools to make building my website a lot easier. Now suppose I had created all those classes before I started creating the HTML page and I had also included things like pre-fabed buttons, tables, grid layout locations and JavaScript actions. I’d have a sweet set of CSS classes that I could just assign to my HTML page to help speed the styling along in no time!
Framework, Frame-what?
All of this CSS goodness is what we call a framework- just like the frame of a house. Once you got the framing of the house complete, you can start hanging all sorts of things on it- siding, doors and windows, brick and drywall. It makes completing the rest of the house a breeze! But guess what? Just like there are lots and lots of different types of frames out there for build a house from, there are also lots and lots of different frameworks to choose from to build your web page upon.
How Does Bootstrap fit in?
Bootstrap is just one of the myriad number of frameworks out there in the wild, but it is super easy to get up and running. Plus, Bootstrap is open source software which means it is freely available to be used and modified however you like! However the benefits don’t stop there. It’s responsive which is a huge deal for today’s websites. Once you have Bootstrap set up your webpage, it is instantly ready to be accessible from any size of device such as smart phones, tablets or desktop computers with monstrous screens. Pretty slick, huh?
Need more info? There are tons of YouTube videos, quick-start tutorials, guides and help from the sizable community base to get you started. That’s not even counting the extensive documentation on the Bootstrap website. Are you ready to dive in yet? Perfect! Go check out http://getbootstrap.com/ to get started using a popular and friendly framework on your next project.
Cheers!
-Matthew Vazquez
