How to Use Bootstrap Templates

What Are Bootstrap Templates?

Bootstrap templates are pre-designed website or software frameworks or base layouts that leave minimal space for custom styling. With templates, minimal custom CSS is mainly used for layout purposes, and few styling or design decisions are made.

Web Design

The goal of web design is to make a website more visually appealing and inviting so that visitors who stumbled upon the site will be able to surf through the website seamlessly and be tempted to return. It is now an essential and integral phase of web development. Myriads of social media, eCommerce, and portfolio sites are some examples of sites benefiting from taking web designing seriously. 

However, web design can be an arduous task. It can be difficult to come up with ideas and create quality designs. Since it takes a lot of time, most web designers use bootstrap templates in the web design process.

Why use Bootstrap Templates?

The point of using Bootstrap templates is to reduce the time taken to complete the web design project.

If you have a specific design in mind, you will first have to lay down the basic layout on which you will add designs, features, and functionalities to your project. A template offers a blank slate when starting a new project.

For instance, if you would like to create a portfolio website, you will need the page divided into partitions that display personal information, resume, skills, etc.  It’s far faster to employ a predesigned bootstrap template instead of wasting time choosing a format.

How to Use Bootstrap Templates?

Now we know what bootstrap templates are and how using them makes the designing process easier. Next is to understand how to use them.

The way developers construct bootstrap templates determines how they are used. Some come with a project builder config that uses Gulp or Webpack to compile the Sass files and make development easier. In contrast, others may come with a project builder config that uses Gulp or Webpack to compile the Sass files and make development easier.

Bootstrap templates have the advantage of being compatible with a wide range of back-end languages and frameworks, including Laravel, Express Node.js, ASP.NET, and many others.

Developers can also use Bootstrap templates with front-end technologies like React, Vue, or Angular.

Another noteworthy point of utilizing bootstrap templates is that they are usually well documented. This means you will have no worries about how to work with them, as when purchasing or downloading the templates, you will also get a setup guide that will guide you with the deployment.

Helpful Bootstrap Templates

To enrich your website’s online presence, it is essential to rely on bootstrap templates that give a more neat and delicate look to your web page. Here are some of our recommendations of some helpful and rich bootstrap templates that you can add to your project:

1. Panagea

PANAGEA is a sleek and straightforward HTML5 travel site template perfect for businesses/agencies that provide tourism services: it can be used to provide basic information about destinations, buy tours, and book hotels and restaurants. It comes with four pre-made colour schemes, but you can easily add your own using a SASS or CSS file.

2. New Age

New Age is a Bootstrap app landing page template that will help you present your web app or anything else stunningly. This includes HTML5/CSS Device prototypes that are simple to use, a custom fixed navigation menu with scrolling animations, SASS/SCSS files for more customization, etc.

3. Bell

Bell is a Bootstrap 4 single-page template. It is suitable for various business websites, including those for agencies, startups, businesses, factories, real estate, construction, finance, consulting, cleaning services, and other types of businesses. Bell has a lot of cool features, including the latest Bootstrap support, Sass/SCSS source files, Parallax blocks, and animated scrolling.

4. Sundown

Sundown is a Bootstrap 4-based clean and modern portfolio template for creatives. Graphic designers, interior designers, architects, photographers, and painters will like this theme’s clean and elegant design. Sundown also features a call to action, a part about the team, and a piece with Google Maps integration for contacting us.

5. Philosophy

Philosophy is a blog template that works well for lifestyle, fashion, culinary, personal, design, and other cool blogs. It has enticing features, including a beautiful grid structure for posts, a lazy loading effect, four different post types, and more. This blog template has a lovely grid structure that will make your blog stand out.

How to Edit Bootstrap Templates?

Though bootstrap templates were intended with the goal of assisting designers in saving time and effort when designing, you will almost always want to incorporate some original designs of your own.

Which why here are some helpful steps on how to edit bootstrap templates:

• In the project’s root folder, create a custom stylesheet.
• Return to the website in your browser.
• To open the code inspector, press F12. Alternatively, you can open the code inspector by right-clicking anywhere on the page.
• With the arrow available in the code inspector’s control panel, which you can find at the bottom of your page and on the extreme left, select the element you wish to edit.
• Make sure you’ve selected the ‘inspector’ option in the far left panel. Matching CSS properties within your code inspector panel will appear in the right portion with the selector names. Now copy and paste the selectors into your customstylesheet.css file.
• Add your desired properties here if you wish to override Bootstrap’s custom CSS.
• After linking the page to the bootstrap custom CSS file, link your customstylesheet.css to the page. Otherwise, your custom CSS’s override attribute could not work.

Conclusion 

Bootstrap templates go a long way toward making it easier for experts and non-techies alike to create an elegant website. There are numerous bootstrap templates available; select one depending on your site’s theme and use it to enhance your site’s features. To find out more about Bootstrap, check out this blog.

Free Coding Challenge

Bootstrap is one of the many things that you will learn in Code Institute’s Full Stack Software Development programme. However, if you want to learn some basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript for free, why not try our free 5 Day Coding Challenge? Register through the form below.