Strapping up with Bootstrap

At this point in time, I’ve now completed a week’s worth of coding in HTML. When building these websites in VSCode, we were tasked to use Bootstrap 5 for our websites. This was interesting to use, because bootstrap 5 is an incredibly useful framework that can be used in such a massive variety of ways, to the point where learning it can be rewarding in it of itself. However, because bootstrap is only a framework, it can require a ton of learning to be able to get the hang of. Luckily, through this past week, ample opportunity was provided to gain experience. And through this experience, we can explain what bootstrap does for us that raw HTML can’t.

Why bootstrap?

What makes bootstrap so useful to work with is that it almost entirely does wonders for the style of our pages. HTML is a pretty good language to build websites with, but it’s limitations is that it takes a lot more time to actually build your website. Bootstrap, by default, will help you out with color, spacing, and font, and it can also help you with designing menu bars and ways to navigate, all in much fewer lines. The tradeoff to this is that learning how to use bootstrap is arduous, but because it’s arduous, it makes coding a website significantly easier to do once you finally get past the learning curve. However, bootstrap does have some limitations, especially compared to HTML.

Bootstrap vs HTML

The differences that I noticed, when working with both parts, is almost entirely in customization. This is to be expected, because building websites boils down entirely to how they can be customized. But what I ended up finding, when working with both, is that both offer unique approaches to customization. HTML is admittedly a lot more tedious to write out, but it offers more control. You can decide upfront what and how you want to present parts of the website. This makes it good for customization, because it offers tons of freedom to be able to make the site you want to make. Bootstrap, on the other hand, is a massive set of pre-built parts. You lose out on the ability to configure everything to your own needs, but if you’re in a crunch, it will achieve all of your goals a lot quicker, making it great in a team-context. Which is better ultimately is determinant on what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re trying to make your own personal blog about hyper-niche subjects, maybe it’s more convenient to use HTML. But, if you’re in a team trying to create a website about manufacturing a product, bootstrap might be more convenient.