I sometimes use stuff because everyone else is using it. And then I wonder why I did that.
I recently removed bootstrap from a website I have that is composed entirely of static HTML documents [1]. It's a teaser / marketing site for my current project. The sample sites looked nice and I figured that since I and CSS are of basically nodding acquaintance -- why not?
I discovered that Bootstrap was just too featuresome for my requirements and I could not, for the life of me, get it to look correct. Everything was slightly out of place. It drove me nuts.
This led to a quest to find a simple stylesheet with a document-focused layout. Such a thing is not easily found; all and sundry are bloody obsessed with displaying their infinite genius through monstrously bloated code for designs that swoosh and swoop and resize and spin and have this and that and the captain's hat.
In the end I repurposed a stylesheet I'd commissioned as part of a wordpress theme from a good designer I know and trust[2]. A simple columnar layout. Done, dusted.
[2] http://dribbble.com/karlbright . Insofar as the stylesheet you find above is bad, that's because I've been hacking on it for a few weeks since forking the original.
I clearly know why I chose Bootstrap for some of my sites:
i) In the past I spent a lot of time with designers and now I can design a site from scratch myself (I am not a web developer). Before bootstrap sites designed by me looked very well on Mosaic :-)
ii) If I work with a designer I need to spec a lot of details (bullets, headings, columns, colors) and how the fit together. With bootstrap I know that I can change what I don't like.
iii) I can then talk with a designer to only change what I don't like. So Bootstrap is a foundation base.
An example of this is http://www.nektra.com where I use Python Django and Mezzanine as CMS. I've not implemented yet the last designer version which is better. Another site http://www.securecouponcodes.com is just plain bootstrap and was implemented a little bit after the framework was released. If it not were by bootstrap the second site would be delayed since it was implemented only by me.
Your two examples are very nice for being a non-web developer (by which I take you mean "designer"). For a non-web designer such as myself - in fact I am pathologically bad at it - you give me some hope that with Bootstrap I can knock out some nice looking sites for some moonlighting work I'd like to undertake.
I develop software for the desktop (mainly Windows). Obviously I can develop web applications but my issue was related to design. I really don't want to learn CSS beyond the basics to do trivial fixes.
I recently removed bootstrap from a website I have that is composed entirely of static HTML documents [1]. It's a teaser / marketing site for my current project. The sample sites looked nice and I figured that since I and CSS are of basically nodding acquaintance -- why not?
I discovered that Bootstrap was just too featuresome for my requirements and I could not, for the life of me, get it to look correct. Everything was slightly out of place. It drove me nuts.
This led to a quest to find a simple stylesheet with a document-focused layout. Such a thing is not easily found; all and sundry are bloody obsessed with displaying their infinite genius through monstrously bloated code for designs that swoosh and swoop and resize and spin and have this and that and the captain's hat.
In the end I repurposed a stylesheet I'd commissioned as part of a wordpress theme from a good designer I know and trust[2]. A simple columnar layout. Done, dusted.
[1] http://confidest.com
[2] http://dribbble.com/karlbright . Insofar as the stylesheet you find above is bad, that's because I've been hacking on it for a few weeks since forking the original.