What is Bootstrap? What is Useful About This CSS Framework?

The CSS of an element is essential to contributing towards the overall design of a website. It is easy to use and easy to write. However, due to the high degree of freedom in describing the CSS of elements, there are times that problems such as a "lack of consistency in code" and "lack of reusability of code" crop up.

To solve this issue, let's look at a CSS framework called "Bootstrap" which is pretty useful in this situation.

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Table of contents

About CSS frameworks

If you are working on a project as a team, as opposed to creating a personal website by yourself, it is essential to follow certain coding rules and make the CSS description consistent.

CSS frameworks gather commonly used "elements" and "functions", so you can save the time and trouble of producing them yourself. By following the specified coding rules of the framework, users can easily unify their coding practices.

Because we end up designing the website under rules prepared in advance, a disadvantage is that it can be difficult to customise and make original designs using frameworks. However, they give you the advantage of improving maintainability, which is considered extremely important in CSS.

Faster development time

Unified CSS is indispensable to website creation. And Bootstrap is a tool that enables speedy coding.

There are many types of CSS frameworks, but Bootstrap is a framework developed by Twitter, and was originally called Twitter Bootstrap.

Bootstrap has abundant reusable components and functions that allow you to create each layout, advancing the design of the website without having to code CSS from scratch.

Also, any JavaScript or jQuery that is necessary for creating a dynamic website can be easily introduced into the codebase.

A great advantage for Web Designers using Bootstrap is that it easily handles responsive design. Adapting designs across multiple devices is now becoming the norm, and using Bootstrap makes it unnecessary to struggle to adjust minute details since the framework takes this need into consideration.

How should a beginner get started?

The latest version of Bootstrap can be downloaded from the official Bootstrap website. Follow the steps below to install.

1. Press the "Download Bootstrap" button on the official site and start downloading the latest version of Bootstrap.

2. Extract the downloaded bootstrap zip file and locate the dist folder. There are three folders in the dist folder: css, fonts, and js.

3. Please upload the following file to your server.
· bootstrap.min.css in the css folder
· all the files in the fonts folder
· bootstrap.min.js in the js folder

How to master Bootstrap

The functionalities that a website requires quickly changes according to the times. Bootstrap reflects the trend of such functionalities. Thus, if you can master it, you will vastly improve your productivity and expand the range of expressions in your arsenal.

However, Bootstrap is s essentially just a CSS framework, and a tool for making CSS easier to use. If you do not know the basics of CSS, you can not use Bootstrap.

CSS combines three basic elements, a "selector", "property name", and "property value" to set the style of an element. The structure is simple and easy to understand, and we recommend that you invest the time to teach yourself.

To master CSS and Bootstrap, it is important to first practice so that you can write maintainable and highly extensible code while getting down the basic grammar rules of CSS.

In conclusion

Depending on how you describe your CSS, code uniformity and consistency may become an issue; but by using a CSS framework like Bootstrap, it is possible to create a website that is quick and easy to maintain.

Bootstrap's great appeal is that it has abundant functionalities and components that incorporate the latest website trends. The ease of handling JavaScript and jQuery, which are indispensable for adding dynamic elements, is also a major advantage.

If you code according to the defined framework rules, you can save a lot of time and effort, which also reduces the burden on designers and improves productivity.

However, in order to customise Bootstrap, knowledge about HTML, CSS, JavaScript is essential. If you are interested in learning all of the above, please take a look at our Full-time Coding Bootcamp course!